UNFINISHED PROJECTS

 

UNFINISHED PROJECTS

BY HELDER SOUSA


“(…)The idea of progress brings with it several variables that do not always fit with the specific realities of each territory. It is up to each responsible entity(ies) the management of its own territory, through the understanding of its true needs; and depending on future expectations, create a balance between what is offered and what is searched for, and not the opposite.”

Hélder Sousa is a photographer since 2008. After finishing a degree in Plastic Arts-Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Oporto, he started exploring photography as an artistic expression. In search of new knowledge, he decides to do a Master degree in Audiovisual Communication, specializing in Film and Documentary Photography at the School of Music and Performing Arts of the Polytechnic Institute of Oporto.

His final Master´s course work is Unfinished Projects, completed in 2012, which focuses on urban development in the municipality of Valongo, on the outskirts of the city of Oporto. Later in that year he participated at the first edition of Project Living in Art, a photography field of study held in Portalegre, sponsored by Robinson Foundation.

Hélder Sousa has an interesting contemporary photography work focused on our territories and how they are transformed and appropriated by man. In between document and fiction, as there is a strong aestheticization of the territory and its contradiction, in “Unfinished Projects”, a new visibility is given to the ghost neighborhoods of the Valongo County. These non places, which are not only the result of the economic and financial crisis caused by subprime, but also of the failure of a social state unable to regulate the savage and predatory capitalism of real estate speculation.

The exposure and questioning allowed by the documental side of “Unfinished Projects” are heightened by the plastic options and visual grammar displayed in the images of this series. In other words, the imagery created to reveal and explore these wrecks, these architectures of entropy – which are in fact fake ruins, because they were never inhabited, as well as metaphors for failed life expectations, for broken promises – is an artistic strategy to reinforce the documentary.


Pedro Leão e Maria Neto

 

USUAL PLACE

 

USUAL PLACE

BY SERGIO CAMPLONE



Sergio Camplone studied photography at “c.f.p. Riccardo Bauer” in Milan. Among his more recent projects, there are “Anagrafe del danno” cured by Fuorivista and Confotografia. “Breviario di un paesaggio incompleto”, cured by Calamita/à, about Vajont area, 50 years after the landslide. “For the use of hyperimages”, with Saverio Cantori, cured by Antonello Frongia. He worked for the European project “Bridges of History and Tradition”, mapping out Southern Italy bridges, together with Greece. With Architecture Department of Matera University, he follows the Re-Cycle activity, about spatial and social backgrounds of postwar small villages and neighborhoods, with the project “Una questione meridionale”, ongoing. His attention is mainly addressed to the identity of places vulnerable to gradual mutations and modifications, and he uses different kind of narration, connecting territory unavoidable alterations made by the men, with their ability of transforming the landscape, and be landscape themselves.

synopsis
The action that the man has fulfilled “to build” the landscape, moving it over and over again from a naturality condition to a growing artificiality condition, in any historical era, has brought the man to overlay above the order of nature his mental order, causing a great complexity that we know exist on every its shape. And it was the human gaze at do even a wild landscape a cultural object, the human experience it allows to live it like wild, to shape the its image and its meaning through the filter of the culture and the history.

 

UMA LINHA NA PAISAGEM

 

UMA LINHA NA PAISAGEM

POR SOFIA SANTOS

 

Uma linha que se desenha na paisagem através do tempo. Uma linha que revela diferentes tempos, expostos, neste percurso, em simultâneo. Uma linha, um percurso que é também um rasto da passagem humana. Um rasto feito de marcas da atividade humana, umas mais evidentes, outras quase indeléveis no modo como a paisagem se transforma. As imagens resultantes desta pesquisa são a evidência material de um percurso físico realizado pela autora, entre Famalicão e a Póvoa de Varzim. No seu conjunto resultam numa sequenciação que sugere esse movimento compassado, focado, orientado – num enquadramento em que o ato de caminhar é colocado no centro da imagem. O que decide este enquadramento? Parecem concorrer dois aspetos distintos: por um lado o modo como esta paisagem foi construída enquanto linha ferroviária, e por outro o movimento que o nosso corpo descreve nela. Alguns desvios, relativamente a este movimento direcionado, dão-nos a ver detalhes desta paisagem que, à direita e à esquerda do percurso, revelam a sua dimensão temporal.

É um trabalho que se desenvolve em torno da perceção e da representação deste território tão particular do concelho da Póvoa de Varzim. Uma paisagem que permanentemente sedimenta as marcas milenares da presença humana.

Diapositivos cor 35mm

Projeção de dimensões variáveis

Nota: O projeto Uma linha na paisagem foi apresentado na exposição Póvoa de Varzim, Frames da cidade e outras estórias invisíveis, no espaço A Filantrópica, de 28 JUL a 30 SET 2017. Por ocasião desta exposição é editado catálogo com o mesmo título, onde o projeto é igualmente publicado.

 

Sobre o autor

Sofia Santos (Porto, 1985) artista e educadora, licenciada em Artes plásticas – Pintura (2007), foi bolseira na Academia di Belli Arti di Brera, em Milão (2006). Mestre em Arte e Design para o Espaço Público (2009) pela Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto. O seu contínuo interesse pela imagem leva-a a desenvolver mais recentemente estudos em Cinema e Fotografia Documental (2017), pela Escola Superior de Media e Artes e Design, do IPP. Colabora com diversos artistas e arquitetos, e participa em diversas exposições desde 2007. Mantém desde 2008, uma relação de coautoria, com a artista Joana Nascimento, motivada pelo questionamento de conceitos partilhados no trabalho de ambas – paisagem, identidade, memória e tempo são alguns dos conceitos explorados. Estes conceitos permitem ainda identificar um constante cruzamento entre a prática artística e a investigação prática em projetos de carácter educativo. Desde 2010, colabora com o Serviço Educativo de várias entidades, (CIAJ, BOA- Bombarda Oficinas de Artes), na conceção e orientação de atividades dos seus diversos programas, destacando-se a colaboração com o Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves pela continuidade e consistência dos processos pedagógicos experimentados.

 

UM LUGAR QUE SE DESENHA

 

UM LUGAR QUE SE DESENHA

BY JOÃO GIGANTE

João Gigante, was born in Viana do Castelo whose course, after having graduated in Fine Arts from the FBAUP (Oporto), has maintained  the experience of fine arts, having exposed his work in several major exhibitions in the national and international art scene,  the practice of production and organization of events and artistic projects, such as the coordination of the Department of Fine Arts of AISCA , Viana do Castelo, the direction of the magazine Parasita (with Hugo Soares), the project Arame (Sound Design) and the projection and organization of social and ethnographic  projects, maintaining their artistic and conceptual features.

Their work complements the different areas of fine arts performance, such as installation, photography, video, sound design and drawing.

Currently he is obtaining a Masters degree  in Audiovisual Communication at  the Escola Superior de Música, Artes e Espectáculo of the IPP (Instituto Politécnico do Porto).

synopsis

 “Um lugar que se desenha”: a visual essay on the territory and its demographic and organizational particularities. The clay soccer fields are part of an imagery construction. Uneasy is the field-to-field variation, the football goal as a hinge, as the support in the perception of this place mutation. In other words, all these places with similar functions, earn characteristics both specific and disparate. These variations and landscape changes reflect the author’s path in site.

To find, to archive and to select. The images resulting from this study are framed by the presence of a central rectangle (football goal), giving shape to the construction and sequencing of the photographed places. The images are drawn by this space’s already existing framework: who decides the framework? The author or the form? This duality is key to the perception of the presented photographic structure. The abstraction towards the representation of a particular territory. A work around the pathways of the place as a means of perception and representation of it.

 

THE GREAT EASTERN

 

THE GREAT EASTERN

BY SCOTT CONARROE

Scott Conarroe (b.1974) is a Canadian photographer based in Zurich. His studies of landscape and the built environment look at the present within a sweep of history.  His recent book By Rail and By Sea describes North American civilization along its rail infrastructure and its coastline perimeter. In 2013 he received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to photograph the moveable borders Alps nations devised in response to permafrost melt and watershed drift.
Scott has an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and is occasional faculty at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.  He is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery.

synopsis

"The Great Eastern" looks at China against the backdrop of high-speed rail expansion.  Rivalled only by the scope of America’s Interstate Highway System, this massive public works project is designed to bring the far-flung backwaters of the world’s most populist nation into the 21st century.  These photographs are about human-scale lives playing out alongside such grandiose dramas.

author's note
Note: Support from the Canada Council for the Arts and TIME Magazine made "The Great Eastern" possible.

 

THE GREAT ESCAPE

 

THE GREAT ESCAPE

BY RICARDO DOMINGUEZ ALCARAZ


My work is focused in my physical environment, whatever be urban or natural. It is essential for me to be able to investigate this environment because I consider it a key for know better ourselves as society and, thus, myself.
I think it is important to know where you move daily and why your surroundings are like that and what kind of importance have them for your own life, your social relationships, your way of thinking or for your own identity. For all this reasons I’m interested in our environment, I’m interested in the way it affects us and in the way it marks us. I’m interested in the way it is used, for what and why, whatever be seen in a public point of view or in a private point of view. I believe that the environment determine us, but we are who build it, who decides to use it in a certain way or who leaves ourselves in what these environment propose. Our near and quotidian surroundings are both built and imposed.
For these reasons I believe in the importance of investigate our surroundings. They are a reflection of us, as individuals and as society. And, thus it, is how ourselves can be seen, how we can see our fears, actions or uses. I think is the best way to know better ourselves: through our track into our own territory, whatever it be physical or cultural or emotional.
My work method always begins with a key question: “why”. Through it, is developed all the investigation of the photographic subject, as well in the conceptual way and in the visual way. This question is complemented with another of how, for what, in what sense, why this way, … so I can get a complete vision of the environment that I’m working.
After that I have to feel this environment in first person, which cost some time, but it is essential in order to get of them all what can be give. The method is simple: walk, walk and walk. I think is the best way of realise how is the environment and appreciate it, so you can talk about the atmosphere, of what is heard, how it smells and, then, you can feel more intensely what you could see. For me, walking through these places is essential in order to talk properly of them through images.
On the other side, being a graduate in History of Art helps me to ask the point question, helps me in the search of a new points of view and helps me to appreciate the pictures can be done. The Photography, in addition, works for me not only as a language or as a tool, but as a way of being, of life and to see the world. For me it is not a job, it is my way of life, my way of being. I can’t understand the world without a camera, without being able to take photos. Even, it is therapeutic for me, because through the pictures I can understand better our environment, our society and myself as a human being.

Ricardo Dominguez Alcaraz


sinopsys
the Great Escape talks about you, about me, about us as a human beings. Talks about our past, present and future. Talks about our fears and hopes, about the absences, about the melancholy, about your life and what to do with it. Talks about the need of find a way, about the need of find the serenity.
They are pictures of yourself in front the need to be yourself. They are pictures of questions that require an answer. They are pictures of your own life, of your own soul.
They are pictures where you, simply, are.

 

THE DISCONNECTED LANDSCAPE

 

THE DISCONNECTED LANDSCAPE

BY NICOLÒ SERTORIO

 

This series evolved from driving alone for thousands of miles in the American Southwest over the last few years. Here I noticed how the scarcity of the natural element makes human interventions particularly evident.  

I explore our relationship with the perceived natural environment: 'nature' is not the ideal postcard void of human presence, but more realistically the 'outdoor' views we experience when moving from one place to another. This new modern landscape cannot be separated from human constructs. Epitomized by 'the road'; freeways, overpasses, vehicles, ads, poles, and signs are what we truly experience. We look at them every day and yet we choose not to see them. We experience them without acknowledging them. And in so doing, we perpetuate our disconnect: nature as something external, to exploit, and at our service. We work against nature instead of within it.

 

About the author:

Nicolò Sertorio (1968, Princeton NJ USA) is an internationally exhibited artist with over 15 years of experience in visual storytelling.  

Sertorio works in fine art and commercial photography, mixed media, collaboration, and conceptual art. His photos directly respond to the surrounding environment by emphasizing aesthetics and everyday experiences. Sometimes radiating a latent violence, these photographs show through their disconcerting beauty multiple layers of meaning. With his conceptual approach, Nicolò Sertorio investigates the dynamics of 'landscape' and how we relate to the environment around us based on cultural and social assumptions.  

In past years he has lived for long periods of time in Italy, Switzerland, Ireland, Belgium, India, Germany and United States. Sertorio has thus a cosmopolitan understanding of contemporary issues that makes his perspective unique.  

Sertorio's work has won several important awards, including American Photography 33+32+30+29, International Color Awards 2016-15-14-13, International Landscape Photographer of the Year top 101, Prix de la Photo Paris, PDN Photo of the Day, The Center for Fine Art Photography 'Portfolio ShowCase 6', Photo Week DC International Awards, among others.  

His work has been featured in Wired Magazine, LensCulture, Kontura Art (Croatia), Domus, AdWeek, Fraction, Time, Curator, Format, Nacional (Croatia), Fast Company, Feature Shoot, Google ChromeCast, AIGA, Wacom, ViewFind, and many more.  

In 2017 and 2015 Nicolò Sertorio was recognized and selected as Critical Mass Top 50. In 2016, solo exhibitions traveled across US (Philadelphia) and Croatia (Koprivnica Art Gallery, Split Diocletian Palace, Virovitica Castle) museums.

Sertorio's works tell a story about the effects of the interaction between self and others. His series are notable for their conceptual nature and the grand humanistic themes in his approach.  

Nicolò Sertorio currently lives and works in Oakland (CA), USA. He is board member for PhotoAlliance.

Site: http://nicolosertorio.com

 

TESTEMUNHO OU CHACADO

 

TESTEMUNHO OU CHACADO

POR ADRIANO PIMENTA

 

"Chacado - ap.m.ant., de (Xahâda) "Testemunho (da fé islâmica)"  

Adalberto Alves, Dicionário de Arabismos da Língua Portuguesa - Imprensa Nacional, Casa da Moeda, Instituto Camões  

Vivi 4 anos na Arábia Saudita. Estas 14 imagens testemunham alguns dos elementos fundamentais da cultura, história e território saudita. Os seus erros e suas mudanças.     

Não são um julgamento fotográfico, mas sim um relato duma fé que esconde as suas contradições. O deslizar e levantar do véu é reclamado por uma nova abordagem na elevação da cultura saudita, livre das restrições interpretadas no livro sagrado.    

Estas imagens simbolizam uma vivência de alguém que aprendeu a observar através da sua máquina fotográfica a singularidade de uma nação, através dos elementos visíveis e invisíveis, que marcam a sua cultura, história e território.    

Nestas 14 imagens o testemunho da solidão é tão presente como a fé para uma nova abordagem.        

Adriano Pimenta                      

Porto, 26 de Fevereiro de 2018

 

About the author

Adriano Pimenta nasce no Porto em 1968. Estuda Arquitetura na Universidade do Porto tendo-se graduado em 1994. Trabalha entre 1992 / 2007 no gabinete do Arquiteto Souto de Moura. Em 2007 funda o seu escritório Adriano Pimenta Arquitetos Lda. Entre 2013 e 2017 vive em Riade, Arábia Saudita, onde trabalha como consultor para a Linha 1/2 & 3 no desenvolvimento do projeto e construção do Metro de Riade.

Em Maio de 2011 é convidado a integrar a revista multimédia Flânerie no 2, editado pela fotografa Susana Paiva, com o trabalho em telemóvel intitulado “IntantI” para o capitulo “Lomoville | Life throught Plastic Lenses”. Em Dezembro de 2015 ganha o 1.º prémio na 6ª edição do Art Jameel Photography Award (AJPA), uma competição fotográfica envolvendo os países parte do Médio Oriente e com a orientação de descobrir fotógrafos emergentes. Em 21 de Março de 2017 publica na revista multimédia norte americana Bosco Magazine. Em Maio de 2017 é escolhido para ser parte integrante da revista “Not For Print, Issue 2” sob o tema “Resist” integrante na plataforma digital ELLO e patrocinado pela empresa Holandesa WeTransfer. Em Janeiro de 2018 é parte de uma exposição coletiva no Dubai “Saudi Seen”, uma nova geração de fotógrafos presentes no Reino da Arabia Saudita pelo Project Space Art Jameel. Em Janeiro de 2018 recebe a Menção Honrosa no Prémio FNAC, Novos Talentos 2017.

 

TERRAIN VAGUE

 

TERRAIN VAGUE

BY ANA BORGES

Ana Borges nasceu em 1987 no Porto, Portugal, onde vive e trabalha.
Em 2010 terminou a licenciatura em Pintura - Artes-Plásticas pela Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto.
Atualmente encontra-se a concluir o Curso Profissional de Fotografia no Instituto Português de Fotografia do Porto.

synopsis

Terrain Vague, conceito que nomeia este trabalho, define, pelas palavras de Ignasi de Solà-Morales, espaços expectantes, (...) mais ou menos indefinidos nas periferias difusas. São manchas de “não-cidade”, espaços ausentes, ignorados ou caídos em desuso, alheios ou sobreviventes a quaisquer sistemas estruturantes do território.(1)
As ruas e estradas fotografadas são o arranque de novas infraestruturas, espaços de expectativa, são também, lugares de ambiguidade e de indeterminação, de instabilidade e de incerteza que apenas garantem a metamorfose, em infinitas possibilidades, da malha urbana.
Este trabalho pretende representar uma espécie de “Outro" da cidade onde se questiona, através do distanciamento, um processo de apropriação acrítico. Estas imagens procuram colocar o indivíduo/espectador num espaço, físico e mental, cujo modo de percepção vai passar além dos limites desse mesmo espaço, criando uma oportunidade de alternância, de utopia, de distância para a contemplação, que não deixa de ser parte integrante da cidade. Procura uma compreensão do espaço urbano como um território vivo, em metamorfose, que responde e respira a diferentes estímulos. Estas ruas e estradas são como o repertório do potencial, do hipotético, do que não é nem foi nem talvez seja alguma vez, mas que poderia (ou pode ainda) ser.(2)


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
(1) Ignasi de Solà-Morales in "Terrain Vague" in "Anyplaces", 1995
(2) Italo Calvino in "Visibilidade" in "Seis Propostas para o Novo Milénio", 1988 (a expressão entre parêntesis - ou pode ainda? - não pertence ao texto original)

 

TEEDOFF

 

TEEDOFF

BY ARTUR LEÃO


Teedoff is a photography series communicating the intimate relationship I was able to establish with Ireland in a recent trip. As I explored the country, I could feel the pulse and rhythm of the whole landscape in a much significant way and with an enormous intensity. The train journey enabled me to be immersed and enthralled by the immensity of Ireland´s East and West territory, something that helped me to capture its essence. The spontaneous and surprising nature of the photographs in this project mirrors the passion to know these spaces and of how they became vital inside me in an urgent way. Thus, the spectator is invited to travel in a deep and enigmatic way through the rivers, cliffs and architecture in a space covered by mysteries and ancient traditions where all the elements suggest a necessity to create a story.


About the author
Artur Leão was born in Porto 1997,graduating at Esap on the  course of Artes Visuais Fotografia. First collective, exhibition July 2017 in Esap. Three Photobooks accomplished. Video Clip created for Benthik Zone.

website

email

 

ROSE COQUILLAGE

 

ROSE COQUILLAGE

BY ELISE BOULARAN

 

Elise Boularan is a photographer born 1984, Narbonne, France who has a Master’s degree in Creation and Artistic Research from the University of Toulouse, having studied photography at the Toulouse School of Photography.

Pursuing a career as a photographic artist, her work is extraordinarily powerful for its calm and enigmatic aesthetics. Time seems to stop with her images and there is a powerful rhythm on her series that draws our attention for its profound interiority and quietness. The work of Elise tries to respond in an enchanting way to life´s secrets, creating photographs that allow for truth to appear as a process of emotion and thought.

She has been published extensively and has exhibited in Europe and the USA, notably in Madrid, Denmark, and New York, as well as the French Institute of Ukraine, The Museum of New Art (Mona) and The Russell Industrial Center (Mona Detroit) in Detroit; the Instituto Cultural de México, San Antonio, Texas Hill Country, Usa. Her work is in several private collections.

Her preoccupations concern the human reality of our time, trying to reveal what can be secret at the individual’s as in the works Rose Coquillage, Vapors or Ça reste. With Boulard´s photographic series the viewer is constantly trying to find the meaning of the juxtaposed images, as well as the poetical relation between the series and the titles.

Around My Legs and Désœuvre(ment) seem series more related with space, architecture and territory. The non-spaces of Auge (Désœuvre(ment) and then the way the territory is punctuated by man´s constructions and infrastructure that have an economic and cultural logic that confronts nature (Around My Legs) are also powerfull aesthetic visual narratives of contemporanity and its contradictions.

 

Pedro Leão Neto

 

PLANTALTO BARROSÃO

 

PLANTALTO BARROSÃO

BY SÉRGIO ROLANDO

Sérgio Rolando studied in IPF, holds a degree in Audiovisual Communication and a Master degree in Documental Photography and Cinema by Polytechnic Institute of Porto, ESMAE in Portugal. He is currently working as a freelance photographer and Documentary Photography lecturer in Polytechnic Institute of Porto, ESMAE.

He exhibits on a regular basis and has a great deal of published work. Is much focused on our territories and how they are transformed and appropriated. Between document and fiction, the work of this author gives us a mapping of contemporary life governed by technology, political and economic forces, and how territories are transformed and appropriated by man.

Sérgio Rolando’s “Planalto Barrosão” puts into question the traditional idea of the protected rural landscape of the Barrosão Plateau, while this territory emerges as a cultural (un)built space, permeated by a set of conflicting transformations. The conflict between identity, heritage and protected rural landscape is a challenge that Sérgio presents through images that reveal various infrastructures that tear the landscape apart, and many built elements – unfinished buildings and other architectures – representative of our concrete-made economy and our culture of blindly importing models. Sérgio also adopts an artistic strategy that draws attention to the conflicts of nature and the destruction/transformation of the environment by man, choosing viewpoints and patterns that reinforce the visual and abstract qualities of these landscapes.

Pedro Leão

Maria Neto

 

OCCIDENTE NUEVO

 

OCCIDENTE NUEVO

BY ANTHONY MARCHETTI

 

Anthony Marchetti is a Minnesota photographer and photography instructor whose work focuses on how people interact with their urban spaces. Marchetti completed a BA at Gustavus Adolphus College and an MFA at the University of Minnesota. Currently, he is an Art Institutes International Minnesota full-time faculty member and also serves as adjunct photography instructor at both the University of Minnesota and Anoka-Ramsey Community College.

 

synopsis

San Ysidro, southern-most city in San Diego County on the U.S./Mexican border, hosts the world’s busiest land border crossing. At this site, Tijuana receives and recycles San Diego’s discarded architectural waste, re-using and reconstructing materials into unique structures that offer new opportunities for living and working. This photographic project focuses on this cross-border transmigration of building materials and small suburban homes from San Diego to Tijuana. Although located only 20 miles apart, few cities could be more different. San Diego calls itself “America’s finest city,” boasting some of the country’s wealthiest subdivisions, while Tijuana is viewed as decadent, transient and poor (as UCSD architecture professor Teddy Cruz describes it, “a contemporary Sodom and Gomorrah”). As building materials and small homes find their place amidst existing Tijuana neighborhoods, other transported homes are springing up in undeveloped outskirts surrounded by open desert or ringed by sparsely populated squatter communities. While these Tijuana images share affinities with Robert Adams’s mid-1970s work The New West, presenting newly developed tract homes against a barren western landscape, they also offer important differences. Adams documented the human imprint on the American landscape – a stark, expansive natural world, flattened and manicured to make room for tidy boxes providing practical living space, yet seemingly devoid of aesthetic.

This project departs significantly from Adams in both intent and result. Adams’s images reveal the driving force of American commerce and expansion as residential developers cleared huge swaths of land to make room for entire neighborhoods. Growth at Tijuana’s edge is slower, seemingly more haphazard or at least devoid of a master plan. Instead, these images of small homes reveal individual desires to carve out personal space from a crowded urban center. They exemplify serendipity and intention, cultural originality and assimilation. As Tijuana grows and pushes at its less populated perimeter, development will fill the open spaces surrounding these transported homes.

San Diego’s architectural refuse and discarded small homes represent new opportunities for low-income Mexican residents, and the project documents the cultural influences and ingenuity of grass-roots construction through re-use. By examining this process of transmigration, assimilation, and transition, I hope to reveal more about how people build, deconstruct, and reconstruct spaces in which they live and work, and how culture, expediency, and financial resources influence what is considered trash or treasure, waste or opportunity.

 

Editor´s note

The presented project was selected from a spontaneous submission made by Anthony Marchetti. Our aim is to disseminate and bring to light telling work of emergent or young photographers.

 

NAMIKAKE

 

NAMIKAKE

BY ARITO NISHIKI

 

"By southern coastline of Niigata City is located in northern part of the Sea of Japan. A village sank into the sea by a coastal erosion called "Namikake" in their region. In the darkness of night on this coast, it takes a long time to adjust my vision. Once my eyes get used to it, images of a big rock, trees, a lighthouse, snow and the sea jump into my vision. The images have been there in the darkness, but they suddenly appeared to me. The landscape seems that it hasn't been there before and appeared in that moment I shoot. The coastal erosion that occurs in this region repeatedly changes their landscape each time.It is not the demise that one disappears by erosion, but it is the origin that the other is newly born.Every flash I make in the darkness, new form is born.
While I am at this place, I was feeling ambiguity between existence and creation, and reality and fantasy. It symbolizes that this coast is unstable forever by erosion. "Namikake" series are based on my these feelings in the coast of the snowy winter."

More images of the project  click

 

About the author

Arito Nishiki

Born in Akita, Japan in 1981.

Graduated from Tokyo College of Photography.

Lives and works in Tokyo.

 

Solo Exhibitions

2014. Meguro Museum of Art “NamiKake（Makuridashi）”（Tokyo）

2014. Gallery The White, “ NamiKake and Makuridashi”（Tokyo）  

 

Group Exhibitions

2017. LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017 exhibition at Voies Off Festival (Arles, France)

2016. Gallery The White,「The Ordinary 」（Tokyo）

2015. Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale（Niigata）

2015. The 12th 「1_WALL」Photography Exhibition （Tokyo）   【Award】

2018.The Independent Photographer Competition Landscape finalist

2017.LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017, Finalist

2015.The 12th 「1_WALL」Photography Exhibition finalist

2012.Japan Professional Photographers Society Exhibition JPS Yang Eye Award
 

website : https://www.aritonishiki.com