Hythloday by Norberto Fernández Soriano

Hythloday by Norberto Fernández Soriano

Hythloday is a body of work that draws from one community’s fight against fracking, and presents their experience and beliefs through a visual interpretation of what is positioned between fact and fiction. In the United Kingdom, the trial site for hydraulic fracture-fracking for shale gas – and its potential for national rollout and future commercial exploitation - is located in the countryside between the cities of Preston and Blackpool. A mile down the road from this site, a group of activists - known to the local community as ‘The Protectors’ - set up camp, where they lived and fought to stop this fracking trial.

In what might be described as a “photographic novella”, Hythloday transforms this physical place into an imagined post-fracking scenario, in which the activities, causes, fears, effects and thoughts situated in this place constitute a potential future landscape. Hythloday draws its titled from the name of the sailor in Thomas Moore’s Utopia, which is used as a means to explore and understand the place itself, as well as ‘The Protectors’ fight. Hythloday combines the characters and elements on the ground with the mood to create a journey through an unknown and strange place that reveals the tension between those protrayed and the land they inhabit.

Bio
Norberto Fernández Soriano (1988, Spain) is a visual storyteller and book-maker. He uses photography to explore and interpret the world he inhabits, creating a common ground between contemporary social issues and his own life questions.

Having previously studied Chemical Engineering, his scientific background and self-taught approach to photography has led him to investigate the narrative possibilities of the medium. He is currently studying for a Masters in Photography at University of West of England (UWE Bristol) - his work has materialised in the form of the artist-book, Hythloday, and will be exhibited at the Martin Parr Foundation in 2020.

www.norbertofernandezsoriano.com

Field by Jemima Yong

Field

BY JEMIMA YONG

_FIELD_ is a series of photographs of a single public green during the Covid-19 lockdown and made from my bedroom window. I began making the photographs as a way of creating in isolation. I continued as I wanted to chronicle how the public space was being shared, the physical impact of new social measures and the variety of activities that now take place outside.

Bio
Jemima Yong (b. 1990) is a Malaysian photographer and performancemaker, born in Singapore and currently residing in London. Experimentation, collaboration and time are central to her practice. Her recent work includes _Marathon_ with JAMS (Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award 2018): a performance about fiction, memory and the hysteria of crowds, and _ROOM_: an improvised storytelling experience that takes place in the imagination of the audience. She is a member of Documentation Action Research Collective and an associate of Forest Fringe.
www.jemimayong.format.com

Pandemic Preparation Techniques: 1- Quarantine by Sergio Camplone

Pandemic Preparation Techniques:
1- Quarantine

BY SERGIO CAMPLONE

Now more than ever, we are experiencing such a strong time dilation.Quarantine is difficult, but facts, places and characters of this story have helped me to reflect.I produced the first chapter of the CoVid 19 trilogy following one of the most divisive debates in this pandemic: How the coronavirus travels through the air?Suddenly, daily mundanities seem to demand a military strategy, forcing us to overthink things they never used to think about at all.Can you go outside? What if you’re walking downwind of another person? Is it irrational to hold your breath?Everything seems to be contaminated. Personal Protection Equipment, have become unobtainable luxury objects and so, viral tutorials on the self-production of PPE are spread on the network without considering that they have precise methods of use and disposal.WHO has released some good instructional videos about using PPE and on correct individual behavior. Moreover, the same quarantine, in its simplest form, is the creation of a hygienic border between two or more things, in order to protect both. In this spatial containment strategy, the work follows and conceptualizes some WHO tutorials on the correct use of Personal Protective Equipment.

Bio

He was born in Pescara, he studied photography at R. Bauer in Milan. He teaches photography in various institutions working on the perception and visual representation of new social and urban landscapes.Professionally he deals with architectural photography while his research is focused on on the evolution of the contemporary landscape, on architecture and man.

The fate of the shadows by Raquel Lagoa

The fate of the shadows

BY RAQUEL LAGOA

PT | EN

The visual narrative ‘The fate of the shadows‘ translates in photography the speech resulting from the overlapping of meanings – when the spiritual world intersects the physical world. The photographic sequence makes visible the path through the domestic space that is imperceptible in real life, and, at the same time, filters the contemporary gaze, increasingly superficial and acritical. From this dynamic, surfaces the pertinence of this project like a conversation (author/observer) that stimulates a critical and reflexive attitude towards what, currently, confines us in space - in our home.

The objects that physically inhabit the (real) interior space appear in the photographs printed in the projection of its respective shadows, its materiality is never revealed and these remain undefined accentuating the misticity if the very space where they remain. The monotony of the everyday, accentuated in the period of isolation, enables, consciously or uncounsciously, the reflection through these four walls that limits (our presence in) the space. This being said, the intention to decode and immobilize in images, the signs of passage of time in the intimate space surfaces, unveiling, in silence, an exterior increasingly closer and distant at the same time

Each photograph is a perspective of the interior that reveals an invasion of light in the intimate space, illuminating the surfaces and obscuring the objects, denouncing a clear overlapping of the immaterial world over the material world. The objects get lost in its insignificance and the images reflect a third dimension that foregoes these to exist.

Equally projected – the city – that, antagonically, paints the colors of neutral surfaces of the house and adds a complex pattern without hiding what is overlaps, like a translucid diluted wallpaper between the black stamp of shadows. The photographic narrative comprises a game of collages that highlight the inevitable confrontation between the house and the city, the interior and the exterior, the individual and the collective, the shadow and the light – the fiction and the real. Deep down, if the pandemic forced the isolaton, the isolation reinforced the importance of (knowledge of) inhabiting, with the body and with the gaze, the visible and the invisible.

“... A building is like a soap bubble. is bubble is perfect and harmonious if the breath has been evenly distributed from the inside. e exterior is the result of an interior.”
Le Corbusier, 1927 apud Colin Rowe e Fred Koetter, Collage city (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1978).

Bio

Raquel Lagoa (Figueira da Foz, 1996), student at Faculdade de Arquitetura da Universidade do Porto (2014 - 2020) with an academic path divided between art, science, literature and photography, architecture emerges as a synthesis of those worlds. The disquiet is the state of mind in permanent confrontation with the unpredictability of the current world.

Margem Sul by Luís Aniceto

Margem Sul by Luís Aniceto

Margem Sul is about my home town territory on the south bank of the Tagus river, just in front of Lisbon. Unlike the capital city, where its political and economic prominence is also built upon its symbolic space, the territories on the south bank lack this sovereign, historical and self-referential value in their urbanity. Suburbs were the most used adjective that pointed to a sub-value of its patrimonial reference.

It was this set of places, common in their status but differentiated in their morphology, a-historical and outside the spaces of power and desire, with which I felt affinity and attraction. Places where constructions, made at the taste of the times, heterogeneous, dispersed and diversified, generated in the landscape a strange hybridity, in everything far from the aseptic and rational standardization. Spaces in which the anonymous and indifferent buildings reign by the vulgar omnipresence of its facades and where cars, victims of accident and abandonment, pose mute as useless statuary. But also places that, between the pavement, the asphalt and the beaten path, have not yet been or are no longer, that seem suspended, unfinished and therefore renewedly liberating.

Margem Sul is a project developed over the years, in which I decided to concentrate my work in the search for an imaginary landscape. An imaginary, where the dryness of the soil is paired with the roughness of the facades and objects, in which the constant aggression of sunlight reflects the visible wear and tear of time and transformation. It is in this open field, under an endless blue sky where matter is cut into the void, that I roam through the territory and find a suspension of everyday life in which only my presence seems to inhabit.  

Bio
Luís Aniceto is a Portuguese photographer and educator currently working between Italy and Portugal. After working in Lisbon as a photo reporter for daily newspapers, he moved to Italy to join the collective of photographers Cesura, where he also had the opportunity to work with Alex Majoli. He co-founded ZONA Magazine, a photographic publication born from the interest in thinking and observing the territory of his hometown. He taught at the Portuguese Institute of Photography, where he was also responsible for the cultural program.

instagram: @luis__aniceto
www.luisaniceto.pt

Open Space, Landscape in Reverse by Xavier Delory

OPEN SPACE, LANDSCAPE IN REVERSE

BY XAVIER DELORY

A renewed dialogue between ruin and landscape.
From a modernist office tower of the Glorious Thirty in a state of transient decay, Open space reverses the "classic" ruin / nature representation that can be observed in Flemish landscape painting from the 17th century. Unlike the "composed veduta" by painters from the north where you can see ruins of ancient Rome surrounded by an Arcadian landscape where nature and culture unite harmoniously, here the landscape no longer welcomes ruin, it makes part of the ruin. The mountainous landscape used, refers to the aesthetics of the sublime, giving a tone of confrontation between man and the forces of nature.
By introducing a landscape “freely” into this brutalist setting, Open space also plays with the relationship with nature, materials and landscapes, especially with the spatial continuity from inside to outside which was at the center of the concerns of the first modernist architects who wanted to put man back at the heart of "Creation" thanks to technique.

Bio
Xavier Delory, born in Liège (Belgium) in 1973, studied interior architecture and photography. His work is on the frontiers of art and architecture, questioning the characteristics of digital photography in its relationship to reality and to the construction of an image. The artist uses digital photomontages to create fictional architectures.

https://www.xavierdelory.com/

Rays of Hope by Diego Duenhas

Rays of Hope

BY DIEGO DUENHAS

PT | EN

After nearly twenty days in quarantine, following the sad news that still haven’t ceased, I began reflecting about some projects/dreams of traveling to photograph that I’ve been continuously postponing. The question that persisted: “Will I survive to make those trips?“, “Will the future world be open to receive me?“, “How extensive and deep are the damages?“. Following this line of thought I began searching videos of some places in the world and I felt the need to photograph them in my own way. I opted to make artistic cuts using the long exposure technique from the standpoint of the mechanical eye of static photographic cameras fixed in moving vehicles. The result is this small series that I’ve titled “Rays of Hope“ in a wordplay between the visual effects obtained and the emotion that all mankind should share in this sad times we are living.

Bio

A designer and photographer since 1999, Diego Duenhas works in web development, UI focused projects, digital media advertising, social media and printed editorial work. He fuses in his design practice his skills in photography and audiovisual media. He graduated in Internet Systems Technology from the IFSP/S.J. in 2017 and he’s currently working as a freelancer.

instagram / @dduenhas

Of Dying and Living on by Daniel Chatard

Of Dying and Living on

BY DANIEL CHATARD

It‘s unusual for a story to begin with the death of a person. But with tissue donation, a process that can change another person‘s life from the ground up starts there. The German Society for Tissue Transplantation (DGFG) provides patients nationwide with corneas, amniotic tissue and heart valves, among other things - the DGFG maintains twelve tissue banks alone for this purpose. The photographs examine the complex system that makes the donation process possible and show the rooms in which tissue donation takes place. The selected photographs, taken in cooperation with the DGFG, explore tissue donation in Germany as a closed system within which the various locations photographed have different functions. They show rooms and still lifes that visualize important steps in the donation process - from the farewell room, where people see their deceased relatives one last time, to the surgery room, where the donations are used to heal the recipients.

Bio
Daniel Chatard (1996) is a Franco-German documentary and portrait photographer based in Hanover, Germany.In his work, Daniel has been mostly interested in the relationship between individuals and their societies, exploring how collective identities shape the human experience. He is available for assignments in Germany and worldwide.In 2015, Daniel started his studies of photojournalism and documentary photography at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hanover. In 2017, he interned as a photographer at Weser-Kurier in Bremen. He did an exchange semester at the faculty of journalism at Tomsk State University (Russia) in 2018.

http://chatard.de/
instagram / @daniel_chatard

The State of the Region by Marvin Systermans

The State of the Region

BY MARVIN SYSTERMANS

The structural change that is coming with the end of the coal mining industry in Germany is noticeable throughout the Lausitz region. The immense quantities of earth that have been moved have not only brought forward new landscapes; With the end of lignite mining, the Lausitz region is also looking for a new identity. This process takes place in different ways in the urban space, the renatured lake landscapes and the surroundings of the still active coal mines. The photo series "The State of the Region" examines places where traditional and young structures coexist, old structures slowly vanish and something new is created. On the one hand, the work deals with problems and conflict issues such as the environmental impact of coal mining and urban vacancy, while at the same time reflecting stereotypical representations of the Lausitz region. It describes the gradual departure of the region from the era of the coal industry, as well as the emergence of Europe's largest lake landscape.

Bio
Marvin Systermans is a german photographer, photo editor and communication designer working on a variety of different projects. His photographic work mainly focuses on different approaches to reflect on urban spaces, structural changes, and the human habitat in general.

Exhibitions

2019 — Solo Exhibition, Galerie im Foyer, Bremen
2019 — Group Exhibition, the horizons Zingst, Environmental Photo Festival
2019 — Group Exhibition, Wendener Hütte, Wenden
2019 — Solo Exhibition, Galery Flut, Bremen
2018 — Group Exhibition, Münzenberg Forum, Berlin
2018 — Group Exhibition, Osthaus Museum, Hagen
2017 — Group Exhibition, Summerset House, London
2017 — Group Exhibition, Forum of Design, Magdeburg
2016 — Group Exhibition, 1st Design Biennale, Havanna
2015 — Group Exhibition, German Youth Photography Award, German History Museum

Awards

2019 — Shortlist Vonovia Photo Award
2019 — Shortlist Canon New Talent Award 2019/2
2019 — Scholarship from the BFF Neuer Förderpreis 2019
2018 — Münzenbergforum Photo Award, 4. Place
2017 — Shortlist Felix Schoeller Photography Award, Best Emerging Artist
2017 — Shortlist Sony World Photography Award, Professional Architecture
2015 — German Youth Photography Award

Residency

2019 — BangaloResidency Goethe Institute, Max Mueller Bhavan.
In collaboration with Raisa Galofre, photographer

https://www.marvinsystermans.com/
instagram / @marvin.systermans

Places of disquiet by Ricardo Nunes

Places of disquiet

BY RICARDO NUNES

In 2016 and 2017 I travelled several times through Portugal, following old memories of places I might have been. Since I was born, I had to visit the land of my parents to spend time with distant relatives, who lived in commuter towns on the outskirts of city centers. Many images of my past are formed by rushing through unknown cities or small villages around the center of Portugal. For a long time, I couldn’t relate to the attractive stories I had come to hear about the country from others. At the age of 21, I explored for myself the historically overwhelming center of Lisbon for the first time. The images of a »Portuguese city« though, still arose from my former memories of places like Barreiro, Queluz or Guarda.​The urbanization of Portugal was accelerated after the fall of Salazar’s dictatorship in 1974. The following and abrupt de-colonialization of African and Asian countries brought many immigrants to Portugal. Housing shortage and accession to the European Union in 1986 consider­ably speeded up the modernization process and strongly shaped the appearance of Portuguese cities. The ongoing financial crisis with rising poverty and criminality, as well as ghettoization, heightens the tense atmosphere. As news of forest fires and police raids were reported, I was told that the crisis and the heat are driving people crazy. It became important to decipher and describe this discomfort towards Portugal. A country with a formerly glorious past. Seemingly empty cities. A state of continuous melancholy. A fear of being spoken to. A fear of revealing that I am a foreigner. The light isn´t warm, it scorches skin, trees and landscapes. This journey to Portugal is an exploration of the feeling I carry — a simultaneity of foreignness and familiarity. The photographs are a portrait of a country I am choicelessly connected to. The loneliness that overcomes me in Portugal still has no release.​

Bio
Ricardo Alves Ferreira Nunes

*1986, Germany

2014 — 2017 Master, HFK Bremen, Germany
2010 — 2014 Bachelor, FH Dortmund, Germany
2012 Srishti, Bangalore, India

www.ricardonunes.de
instagram / @afnunes_

Future Rust, Future Dust by Loïc Vendrame

Future Rust, Future Dust

BY LOÏC VENDRAME

This long-term documentary project across several countries around the world aims to analyze the urban and architectural impact of the last world financial crisis and the burst of the real estate bubble.
Through a "concrete tsunami" exploration of ghost cities, aborted tourism projects, unused infrastructures, or roads leading to nowhere, this project plunges us into a post-apocalyptic atmosphere, vestige of this modern age mixing economic failures, corrupt elected officials, megalomaniac investors and dreams of home-ownership.
Witnesses of this big waste of – often public – money, these modern ruins hide human and ecological tragedies: indebted and defrauded people, homes finished but abandoned when so many people can’t find a place to live, and Nature disfigured for nothing, even in areas protected by law.

In a documentation process of showing the persistence of abandonment and incompleteness of these ‘non-places’ many years after the crisis, the visual approach combines aestheticism and graphism, while retaining these unfinished constructions in their surroundings landscape to reinforce the absurdity of these concrete skeletons, frozen in time, while Nature begins to slowly return back at its place.


‘The Spanish Sahara, the place that you'd wanna
Forget the horror here
Forget the horror here
Leave it all down here
It's future rust and it's future dust
I'm the fury in your head
I'm the fury in your bed
I'm the ghost in the back of your head’

Foals - Spanish Sahara (2010)

Bio
Geographer, now working in humanitarian NGO, and self-taught photographer, Loïc passion's for urban photography was born in 2012. Firstly attracted by contemporary architecture, he explored metropolises to find colorful and graphics architectural subjects, seeking to sublimate volumes and perspectives.

Since 2016, his photographic work shifted towards the study of the dynamics and changes of urban and peri-urban landscapes, through a monographic photo study documenting abandoned, stopped or under-utilized modern spaces throughout the world caused by the financial and real estate crisis.

www.loicvendramephotography.com
instagram / @loic_vendrame_photography

Originally by Gaëtan Chevrier

Originally

BY GAËTAN CHEVRIER

The Earth is this anthropized planet we share and whose future livability we must ensure. The rise of so-called natural disasters, hurricanes, cyclones, tsunamis, earthquakes, remind us of the vulnerability of inhabited spaces, and of the interdependence of human and nonhuman beings living there.Therefore planetary urbanization choices are paramout.

Decisions to build in the most fragile areas - behind dikes, below sea level, on geological faults - which are most often destroyed, remind us of the limits of the act of building.
And these decisions are those that will or will not impact our relationships with the built environment.In this regard, we note today the recurrent choice to focus on improving techniques and engineering to protect ourselves from this planet, rather than to evolve towards strategies for a dwelling that has been conceived as fragile.

Bio
Gaëtan Chevrier, trained as a designer and worked as a graphic designer in an advertising agency for about 10 years. At the same time, he specializes in photography as an autodidact and perfects his art through workshops in Paris and Arles to ENSP.
His work questions landscape (natural and / or urban), man’s place in it and how he can use it. It focuses on the concepts of natural / arti cial and wild / built. Through his artistic approach, he produces a formal and sensitive representation of his surroundings, halfway between art and document.
Lives in Nantes (west coast of France)

gae.chevrier@gmail.com
+33 6.19.39.78.76
www.gaetanchevrier.com
instagram / @gaetanchevrier

Predator/Protector by Nicholas Constant

Predator/Protector

BY NICHOLAS CONSTANT

Exploring the evolution of the battlefield and various forms of distance, Predator/Protector contemplates particular developments that may change the future of warfare (UAV/drone warfare) and what this means not just for the victim but the perpetrators as well. Using Sontag’s ideas of how war imagery on TV and internet distance us further from the actual happenings, as we relate these scenes to the cinematic, Predator/Protector attempts to combat this by showing that these issues materialise and take action from our space and in our time. Reflecting a stereotypical view of pastoral Britain, the land in these images challenge the idea of perception we have towards a modern day battlefield where the land would be completely different, yet the sky would be the same.

Adopting a similar aesthetic to that of British landscape painters then directing the camera towards the romanticised landscape, the project aims to contrast these idealistic and unintrusive views with the reality of what is taking place in these locations to show that they are part of the ever-expanding ‘battlespace’ in the information age. Romanticism derived from a time where the industrial revolution emerged, artists were drawn to look back to natural, idyllic settings in order to contrast and question their current political climate. Here, the images speak about our current time as a pivotal moment for the future of warfare. The interruptions in the landscape hint to how technological advances have meant that the battlefield could be considered to be here just as much as ‘there’ with soldiers technically commuting to and from the battlefield each day.

These images are combined with representations of aspects which cannot be seen from the public eye (the drones themselves and the operating rooms) this uncovers interesting parallels that would not be achievable photographing the actual subjects under investigation. Objects that have particular links to classical meanings are recontextualised to contrast names or places that are in use in the UAV programs. Such as the statue of Hermes, which is the name, the Israeli company ‘Elbit’ named one of its drones used in the 2014 Gaza attacks. The god Hermes is known for being a trickster and a traveller as well as escorting the dead to the river Styx. The fact they named an unmanned vehicle after an omnipresent being says a lot about the perception of the weapon.

Predator/Protector is the name of the new British drone where the name is being changed from Predator to Protector.

Bio
Internationally raised, London based artist with an interest in the spectacle of modern warfare. I explore spaces in which conflict occur particularly interested in the indirect effects on war; how they surface in the everyday and how these issues are dealt with in absence of mainstream media. Using a simple, unintrusive approach to many of the projects, I attempt to make invisible subjects visible through the use of landscape and context. Photographing in a slow and quiet manor, I try to force the viewer to study the image to extract the most information they can to then be reinforced by their own contextual knowledge and personal views. Consciously realising my place as a western spectator of modern conflict issues, I try to make work which aims to resonate with the western viewer in a non-confrontational way, believing empathy is most effective when the viewer pieces the puzzle together for themselves.

Instagram: @nicholas_constant
http://www.nicholasconstant.com/

Pairidaeza by Leonardo Magrelli

Pairidaeza

BY LEONARDO MAGRELLI

Paradise - from ancient Persian Pairidaeza (Pairi - around, Daeza - wall) a place surrounded by walls.

Iran has recently been included in Trump’s Muslim Ban list. This already mostly unknown land will now be even less accessible. This reason alone would suffice to motivate the choice of photographing the country under a different, detached and less propagandistic light. Other issues though emerge in the encounter with this region of the world. 

This series of photographs was taken while roaming the Iranian central desert and the cities within. So many different populations, religions and empires have followed one other for millennia, inhabiting these lands, reaching peaks of astonishing balance with their surroundings. Mithraic temples, Zoroastrian villages, Persian cities, they all were conceived and built in a perfect symbiosis with the land.

And yet today there seems to be a kind of ambiguous struggle to fit in these territories. A latent friction emerge between the human presence and the environment. Things seems to be out of place: ambiguous objects, unfinished buildings, indefinite traces of the mankind are left behind, lying isolated and scattered on the ground. It’s “the mutual interference between the landscape and those who live it” as Baltz wrote in his Review of the “The New West”. 

It may seems outdated nowadays to still talk about the issues raised by the new topographers more than forty years ago. But it must be kept in mind that Iran hasn’t yet started to develop a proper sensibility to the ecological and aesthetical problems of the landscape. The way people live the territory and live inside the territory no longer relies on the fusion with the surroundings, but rather on the separation from it. A separation that becomes quite paradoxical and absurd in many cases. The vast expanses of the uplands are now littered with industrial structures, commercial areas and various buildings. Most of them are surrounded with walls along their outer perimeter. Who are they keeping out? What are they keeping out, in these completely empty and uninhabited territories? Only the landscape is cut out, only the desert, the mountains and their extensive space. One could wonder if this derives from the ancient Persian gardens, however, the paradise is not anymore within these walls, but outside them, hidden from the view.

Bio
Born in Rome in 1989, holds a BA in Design and Architecture from “La Sapienza” university in Rome. While still studying, starts working with the photographer Marco Delogu, director of Fotografia – International Rome’s Photography Festival, and chief editor of the publishing house Punctum Press. Aside from collaborating with the organization of the festival, Leonardo also designed many of the books published by Punctum. Later starts working on his own, to focus more on his photography. In the last years his works has been published in several printed and online photography magazines, and has been displayed in collective exhibitions and festivals.

http://www.leonardomagrelli.com

A World around Disney by Christoph Sillem

A World around Disney

BY CHRISTOPH SILLEM

While perusing Google Maps, I noticed a huge circle 30km to the east of Paris. It was actually the ring road surrounding Eurodisney, which got me wondering if Disney had an influence on the environment beyond its circle. Getting there, I was surprised to see to what extent this was the case. I found a kind of pre-Disneyland that is meant to get all arriving visitors in a happyclappymickeymood before entering the park, but that was not all. As opposed to Eurodisney, where you expect the illusion and pay for being tricked, I also discovered the community of Val d'Euope, which is reality, but you're tricked anyway. It is a Truman Show like über-replica of a French village from the last century, which seems to have sprung up overnight. While Eurodisney is crowded with people, the streets are empty here. Clean and nearly retouched, it is an odd combination of the familiar and the odd. You feel as though you are in another country that is pretending to be French, even though you are indeed in France itself.

Bio
Christoph Sillem was born in Germany and graduated from Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie in Munich.
He currently lives and works in Paris, France.

www.christophsillem.com

Beyond The Ordinary & Updated Landscape by Guillaume Hebert

Beyond The Ordinary & Updated Landscape

BY GUILLAUME HEBERT

These series are a hybrid genre that combine pieces of modern landscapes with, in the background, landscapes that come from old and famous paintings. The name of this series is a notion that tells us about the changes created by urbanisation in our modern societies. These works invite us to compare the vision of an ancient painter with the vision of a modern photographer, in order to remodel our perception of the environment in an aesthetic dimension.

Bio
Guillaume Hebert, also called Guillelmus Paulus Julianus, is a French visual artist more focus on photography born in 1969 in Normandy. He graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Caen (DNSEP : National Superior Diploma of Plastic Arts). He started truly photography in Taiwan in the year 2012. He stays there for 6 years and goes regularly to mainland China. He currently collaborates with a Shanghai Gallery: M Art Center and participates in many festivals and art fair. After his pilgrimage he returned to Europe and settled in Berlin for one year. Back in France, he currently lives and works in the Papal city, Avignon.

www.guillaumehebert.com

brasilia, off the map by Cyrille Weiner

BRASILIA, OFF THE MAP

BY CYRILLE WEINER

Arriving in Brasilia is a strange feeling: an illusionary city that would reveal itself very slowly. From afar, the landscape is flat. Then, above the emptiness, a vibrant shape appears in the bright sun, like a giant model growing up from the ground. The vision speeding faster as the city progressively appears. Unbelievable.

Brasilia is the capital of a vast country. But it is not a city. It is the drawing of a city, a cross in the middle of the desert. An act of possessing a territory, perfectly and globaly achieved from scratch by architect Oscar Niemeyer and urbanist Lucio Costa, under the impulse of president Joscelino Kubitschek.

I came to see a city. I discovered an infinite garden. A wasteland. A suspended space that stretches out of human dimension.
I walked for hours. Off the map and its limits in an urban space that has not yet been conceived for a walker. I met a few men, as my own reflection in a mirror. They walked to the rodoviaria – the main bus station – at the crossing of the two wings of the Plano Piloto.

The public space in Brasilia is the whole territory. Cities’ grounds are covered with ashalt. In Brasilia, despite the sophisticated urban shaping. the red earth does not disappear.

Time is suspended. Life seems to have stopped the shining day of April 21st 1960 : the inauguration day of its new capital, built ex nihilo. Strange scenes of parades of workers, soldiers and officials, between scattered brand new futuristic buidings, like an oversized movie set. A utopia that became real in a thousand days.
Perpetual comeback, perpetual availability for the future.
I came to Brasilia with the feeling of coming back. I left it asking myself if Brasilia exists. It seems to. Not as a myth or a symbol of the modernist utopia, but an available open playground for all the improvisations of all of us.
The real monumentality of Brasilia is its emptiness.

Bio
Photographer born in 1976 and trained at the Ecole nationale supérieure Louis Lumière. His work has been published by numerous international magazines (M Le Monde, Foam, British Journal of Photography, foam, Art Press…) and exhibited at MAC Lyon, at the Rencontres d’Arles, the laurent mueller gallery in Paris and at the Villa Noailles in Hyères. He was the laureate of the Prix Lucien Hervé and Rudolf Hervé in 2012 and the author of Presque île (2009) and Twice (2015). Cyrille Weiner recurrently poses the question of space, and how individuals appropriate themselves to their living spaces, distanced from directives coming from “on high.” Progressively leaving the documentary register, he proposes a universe crossed by fiction, that he establishes with exhibitions, editorial projects and installations.

www.cyrilleweiner.com

Picture of Health by Andy Feltham

PICTURE OF HEALTH

BY ANDY FELTHAM

“The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it”.

Aneurin Bevan, the Health Minister who created the NHS 

Since its inception in 1948, the National Health Service has been the prized jewel in Britains welfare crown. As mortality rates decrease year-on-year, the demand for cutting-edge therapies, and their associated tariffs, continues to rise. A victim of its own success, the NHS faces its biggest fight to date.

Picture of Health is my take on a small corner of the NHS today. Shot over two years, starting in February 2016, I was granted access to all areas across Northampton General Hospital, a mid-sized district general hospital in Northamptonshire, UK.

In part I wanted to explore the unseen recesses of the hospital, hinting at the hidden complexities inherent within the delivery of care. Further, I hoped to highlight chronic underfunding across the NHS, which has meant that the provision of safe care to the populace of Northamptonshire has become increasingly difficult. Despite - or perhaps because of - this, it was also the aim of this project to celebrate the hard work and commitment shown by staff at Northampton General Hospital in providing the Best Possible Care to their patients on a daily basis.

Bio
Andy Feltham is a self-taught photographer who lives in Northampton, UK, who also works part-time within the healthcare setting at his local hospital. He has been exhibited in the UK, USA and Italy and featured in numerous publications, both online and in print. He has also been commissioned to work in the commercial as well as the fine art setting.

Feltham seeks to create a tension within each photograph by using meticulous framing, exposure and technique to detach the subject from its surroundings. This lends a subtle disquiet to the underlying themes of beauty, mortality and humour that hallmark his work. 

www.andyfelthamphotography.com
www.instagram.com/andyfelthamphotography/

To Name A Mountain by Alfonso Almendros

TO NAME A MOUNTAIN

BY ALFONSO ALMENDROS

In the spring of 1863, the landscape-painter Albert Bierstadt, started his second tour across the Rocky Mountains with his friend the American writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow.

The story says that during their expedition, the painter was astonished by the view of an enormous mountain. Immediately he made a sketch where a dark grey storm crosses an imaginary horizon of gigantic peaks blown out of proportion. Bierstadt entitled his painting “A storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie” in honor of his traveling companion’s wife. The work was interpreted as a representation of his emotional anguish and the mountain, unnamed until that date, was named Mount Rosalie in honor of the woman that Bierstadt secretly loved.

Most critics thought Mount Rosalie was impossibly high. The painting and Bierstadt’s work seem to talk about desire, but always through the excess and the violation of a reality that only seemed suggestive for the artist when it was conducted by his imagination. His idea of beauty oscillated between the sublime exaltation of his emotions and the calculated effectiveness of the forms. Both contradictory notions though, is it not an audacity and a frustration at the same time to try to reach a summit? Nevertheless, the purpose of naming a mountain is an act charged of poetry. It tells us about the desire of possession and permanence. It reminds us, through creation, of the memory of those we have loved.

Bio
Alfonso Almendros is a Spanish photographer and lecturer living in Madrid. He graduated in 2010 with a Bachelor in History of Art from the University of Valencia, an Associate Degree in Artistic Photography from E.A.S.D Valencia and a MA Photography in Efti Madrid.

His work has been exhibited internationally, including exhibitions in Encontros da Imagem in Braga, Sala Kursala from the University of Cádiz, the Cultural Center of Spain in Mexico, the King Juan Carlos I Center of New York, Article Gallery in Birmingham or Guernsey Photography Festival and granted in several international competitions like the V Galician Prize of Contemporary Photography, the Roberto Villagraz Grant 2016, the Photographic Museum of Humanity 2014 grant or the Grand Prix Fotofestiwal 2011.

Since 2015, he is a visiting professor at the Instituto Nicaragüense de Enseñanza Audiovisual and the National Cinematheque of Nicaragua, Node Center of Curatorial Studies in Berlin and the IED Madrid.

alfonsoalmendros.com
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Under Construction

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

BY ALEX ATACK

Growing up in Dubai, my parents would take my siblings and I to the UK over the summer holidays. Arriving back to the UAE after five or six weeks away, we’d look out of the window of the car on the way home from the airport and point out all of the things that had changed in the time we’d been gone; a new skyscraper would’ve started construction on what used to be an empty sand lot, or a complex of villas had been flattened to make way for a hotel, or what used to be small roundabout was now on it’s way to becoming a spaghetti junction.

We’d play football in Safa Park – a huge green space with fair ground rides, ice cream stands and cafes. Then two years ago, they dug a canal right through the middle of it, bulldozing half of the park and circling a section of downtown Dubai to turn it into an island. The city changed so quickly, and it wasn’t sentimental about what it got rid of. And this is what Dubai has become known for; these construction projects are what you see on travel brochures and TV shows around the world.

They’ve had to keep up this rate of construction to mirror the city’s transient, expanding population. But because of it, residents live amongst an unusual landscape – a pattern of urban decay means that the peripheries of the city resemble a graveyard of half-funded construction projects. And in the city centres, land is constantly re-purposed for new construction ventures, meaning that the face of the city changes almost literally over night.

Shot over two years on whichever camera I had on me, this project is about the half-built spaces, and looks at how Dubai’s residents live amongst them.

Contact:
http://www.alexatack.com/