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Discovering Contemporary Photography

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#robbiel1 🍊🍊🍈 https://www.instagram.com/p/BtgrHUdlRCi/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=vwhytbwzxi40

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By #johntrifonopoulos https://www.instagram.com/p/BtbphVfFlZ3/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=pueq59hd96gd

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by #sandrineelberg https://www.instagram.com/p/BtanUpwl0Sm/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=199hm39s2lruh

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”Les Enveloppes” by #charlotteabramow https://www.instagram.com/p/BtYqutiF5Cd/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=jsla4959o2gz

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by #josecabaco https://www.instagram.com/p/BtYpaTcl2y7/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=buf9alecl1c4

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Proximity, from City Space series

“I use the city as a stage and transform the physical space into a psychological one.”

Living and working in Chicago, photographer Clarissa Bonet explores the physical and psychological experience of urban spaces.

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The Nameless Dread (ongoing)

The Nameless Dread- taken from Wilfred Bion’s psychoanalytical term- is an attempt to visually approach the dreadful feeling of emptiness and non-understandable anxiety, through a fictional and intellectual prism. While everyone remembers their childhood fears, it is not easy to understand this nameless dread that follows us in adulthood. By seeing the human mind as a cave swarming with odd beings, symbols and strange objects, most of them unconscious and unilluminated, photographs are used as a visual representation of the journey into the unknowable parts of consciousness and as projections of all the fears I might have not been able to conceptualize as a child. The entry into the cave is a re-entry into the womb of the Mother, a place where thoughts go when they are forgotten.

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Azimuths of Celestial Bodies

here are as many ways to tell a story as there are to lie about it. Mine is a journey across the tales and personas that together formed the core of my family. A metaphorical flow of lives now merged into myself: the last of my kin.

The great wars that upset Europe during the last century are the common thread, the grim background and prime mover of the migrations that allowed the paths to intertwine.

A discourse on lineage, linking together what is with what has been: a restitution of memories that have been passed down to me, which I have made mine and freely reinterpreted. It is a visual journal, an illustrated topography of the autobiographic journey undertaken to explore my own geography.

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Sisyphus (2018)

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus tricked Death by trapping Thanatos in chains. Once Thanatos was bound by chains, no one died on Earth, this is why Sisyphus was punished to roll an enormous rock up a hill, only to watch it come back to hit him, repeating this action for eternity.

How we used to think about the world is changing radically every day. Religion is replaced by science, we are flooded by images every day, we want instant access to knowledge. Photography as a medium has the ability to capture everything that’s in front of the camera, the machinery sees even what the human eye is not capable of. We can see universes, stars exploding, microscopic worlds, atom bomb detonation with the safety of the far distance. Through these images, we think we can get closer to understand how the world is functioning without ever experiencing or seeing it through our own eyes.

In series Sisyphus, I constructed an imaginary laboratory where it’s up to the reader to decide where the line lies between fiction and reality without any scientific explanation.

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Excavating the Future City

For the past thirty years, Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama has undertaken a photographic examination of the life of cities and the built environment. Each of his series focuses on a different facet of the growth and transformation of the urban landscape—from studies of architectural maquettes to the extraction and use of natural materials such as limestone, as it is quarried via explosive blasts and subsequently incorporated into the construction of new buildings. In particular, Hatakeyama has routinely returned to the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolis, exploring this ever-evolving urban sprawl from both below and above, mapping the growth and expansion of these sites over time. Additional series focus on other forms of human intervention with the landscape and natural materials, including factories and building sites in Japan and abroad. Finally, his most recent photographs of his hometown of Rikuzentakata, a fishing town that was almost completely destroyed by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami, are also included—an ongoing series begun almost immediately following the disaster. These photographs hauntingly embody the death and rebirth of the city, manifesting a deeply personal connection to the ongoing intersection of geology, architecture, and time.

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There Are No Homosexuals in Iran

Speaking at Columbia University on September 24, 2007, Iranian president at the time Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed: “In Iran, we do not have homosexuals like in your country.”

While most Western nations now officially accept homosexuality and some even same-sex marriage, homosexuality is still punishable by death in Iran. Homosexuals are not allowed to live out their sexuality there. Their only options are either to choose transsexuality, which is tolerated by law but considered pathological, or to flee.

In Denizli, a town in Turkey, hundreds of gay Iranians are stuck in a transit zone, their lives on hold, hoping against hope to be welcomed into a host country someday where they can start afresh and come out of the closet. Set in this state of limbo, where anonymity is the best protection, my photographs explore the sensitive concepts of identity and gender and seek to restore to each of these men the face their country stole from them.

My object is not to portray them as victims of political oppression and harrowing memories, but to focus on their current predicament and their hopes for a better, freer life in which to express their love and sexuality openly, beyond the reach of narrow sexual and gender dictates. The photographs paradoxically juxtapose light, simple, sometimes even festive elements with the gravity of the subject-matter and the precariousness of her subjects’ plight. Alternating between covered and uncovered faces, the series points up the difficulties these men face in reappropriating the identity space they’ve been deprived of. (Laurence Rasti, Carouge 2016)

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Paradise

“I’ve always been fascinated with my home state of Florida. Although it has a surplus of natural beauty, there’s a lot of banality within the state — undeveloped swamps, cookie-cutter housing developments, and strip malls upon strip malls. Since I’ve discovered photography, I’ve been attracted to these scenes. A large part of my work comes out of that fascination with discovering unfamiliar spaces within a place that I recognize as my home.”

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Rodeo Girls

An ongoing portrait project, ‘Rodeo Girls‘ shows young girls from Texas who compete in rodeos. With fundamentally different ideas about their femininity and a contrasting attitude toward gender roles, Szwarc’s subjects engage in the activity traditionally reserved for men. Warsaw-born, LA-based photographer creates poetic portraits deeply rooted in the tradition of American documentary, while undermining stereotypes and beliefs American society holds for women. That said, Szwarc is also fascinated by the girls’ great physical strength and their dominance over animals. “I am interested in the limitation these girls face in expressing their femininity and the transference of it onto animals,” says the photographer.

Born in Warsaw, Poland Lives and works in Los Angeles, California

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The object and the subject

Experiencing the gaze of the Other, feeling starred at, brings a double realization; Beyond the body and the organ of vision, what we see is a conscience, the subject of that gaze. We are confronted to the Other, to its existence separated from us. His gaze brings us the proof of his conscience. This gaze also confronts us with our own existence, when someone looks at us, we see what he sees, us. We are the object of this gaze.

The Other, the way we look at him and the way he looks at us, plays a fundamental part in the way we characterize ourselves. Its inaccessibility generates fantasies and fictions, that in turn shape our perception of the self.    

The images in this series were submitted to an eye tracking test, a technology that records and represents the movements of the eyes of a spectator on an image. Participants were invited to view a series of photography, including their own portrait, while being submitted to this technology. The dots appearing on the images show us where the gaze of the spectators paused, creating at turn an image of the subject as seen through the eyes of a panel of viewers, and a representation of the gaze of a spectator on his own portrait.

The results of these tests, their graphical representations, become the tangible trace of a gaze, reminding of a persistence of vision. The different paths taken by the eyes, the different ways of observing our environment, are all clues of the individuality of the participants, of the existence of separate consciences with their own free will and judgement on our person. These representations explore the differences between the image we have of ourselves and the one that is created in the Other’s gaze, differences that question the existence of a “true self”. The results create an image of self image, a form of realization of the fantasy of seeing through someone’s eyes, of seeing ourselves through someone’s eyes.

Born in March 2nd 1986 in France

Currently lives and work in Paris, France.

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Time is all I’ve got

Sophie de Vos (1992, The Netherlands) graduated in Fine Arts at ArtEZ Institute of the Arts, based in Arnhem. She now lives and works in Rotterdam. Sophie takes a strong interest in human beings, their bodies, psyche, interactions and memories, and displays these themes throughout her work. Delicately, she manages to pose questions on human nature and develops touching narratives with personal experiences, emotions and encounters as points of inspiration. Aside from her photography, Sophie has produced several linguistic works, primarily playing with the theme of repetition, which are often exhibited alongside her photographic work.

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After Lights Out - 2013-2017

Night no longer exists. City lights cover up the stars, and cell phone screens lighten even the darkest of alleyways. And soon, imagine a world in which our lights render even the sun gratuitous. In the darkness of space, light is a beacon of hope. What if darkness in our world once again overtook the night and as an affect, transforming even the most insignificant light into an exception – a mystical phenomenon ? In a world in black and blue, the single incandescence of a bulb could be the greatest promise of an adventure about to start.

“I am a visual artist based in Paris, creating cinematographic and narrative photography series dealing with human interactions and conditions. My work raises questions about our future, the threats that our civilization is facing, the quest meaning and our relationship with technologies.

I have been rewarded by several prices including the SFR Jeunes Talents (France) in 2013, the Sony World Photography Award (UK) in 2016 and La Bourse du Talent (France) in 2018. I have published two books together with Poursuite Edition : L'Indifférence Des Étoiles (2016) and Titanic Orchestra (2017).I'm represented by Galerie Intervalle in France and INTHEGALLERY in Denmark.“

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Suspended moments, improbable scenarios, Matthieu Raffard relates the sweetness of the present at the pace of his emotions, brought together by natural light, revealing the delicate emergence of the real.

Born in 1981 in Paris, Matthieu Raffard now lives in New York. After studying at the Esag Penninghen in Paris, he left to take pictures in China, Ukraine and the Balkans. Nourished by classical culture, he carefully composes each of his photographs to transmit his emotions.