Short Visual Stories

A fine art photography album created in short visual stories to present works of artists in the field of photography with a meaningful content to broaden our perspective at emotional, conceptual or aesthetic level and change our focus on life. To explore the talent of the artists in depth, learn more about their other projects and thoughts behind them, click the links in each article. Instagram - @shortvisualstories Facebook - @shortvisualstories Contact - [email protected]

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Cig Harvey’s series ‘You an Orchestra You a Bomb’ – “a beautiful exploration of the artist’s relationship with life itself paying attention to and appreciating the fragile present. The series captures moments of awe, makes icons of the everyday, and looks at life on the threshold between magic and disaster. Cig has always experienced the world viscerally and this work shows a heightened awareness of the temporary nature of life.

Through breathless moments of beauty,  her images propel us to fathom the sacred in the split-seconds of everyday. Cig’s photographs are interwoven with her intimate poetry…”

The series is published as the third monograph in her remarkable collection continuing on the theme of family in her whimsical style and mastering the mix of images and text.

Source – ‘You an Orchestra You a Bomb’ book.

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Ilona Langbroek’s project ‘Silent loss’ – “I portray the emotions of generation forced to leave the former Dutch-Indies and a life so deeply rooted in their genes. But not only loss and sadness but also magic and animism. Animism is the belief that everything has a soul, not only people but also animals and non-living objects.”

“Indonesia is anchored in the Dutch culture. The invisible influences from Indonesia seep through several generation, it is a country anchored in the Dutch culture. For four centuries, there have been relations between the Netherlands and the former Dutch East Indies that have left their mark. The return to the motherland was for some a return home, for others a first introduction. Once in the Netherlands, the past of the former Dutch East Indies was forgotten and concealed. Stories of suffering, pain and sorrow were covered up.

I create images based upon stories and memories, in which try to visualize the bond between man, spirit and nature. Love to use the contrast between light and dark and the twilight zone between them.

In my photography I want to show a kind of beauty and vulnerability that has arisen from the loss.”

Special thanks to the photographer for the statement.

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Yamamoto Masao’s series ‘Shizuka (Cleanse)’ –  “Living in the forest, I feel the presence of many “treasures” breathing quietly in nature. I call this presence “Shizuka.”

“Shizuka” means cleansed, pure, clear, and untainted.

I walk around the forest and harvest my “Shizuka” treasures from soil. I try to catch the faint light radiated by these treasures with both my eyes and my camera… I have an impression that something very vague and large might exist beyond the small things I can feel. This is why I started collecting “Shizuka” treasures.

“Shizuka” transmits itself through the delicate movement of air, the smell of the earth, the faint noises of the environment, and rays of light. “Shizuka” sends messages to all five of my senses.

Capturing light is the essence of photography. I am convinced more than ever that photography was created when humans wished to capture light.

I hope you will enjoy “Shizuka”, the treasures of the forest, through my photographs.”

Source – artist statement

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Thomas Hauser’s series ‘Amazona, India’ – still lifes of flowers as a symbol of a timeless Memento Mori, arranged in containers of the industrial age like beer, coke bottles and plastic cups, giving a new meaning of the concept of transience as part of the contemporary reality. All elements constituting the image are engaged in a specific kind of dialogue about the moment of mortality: while the topic of natural circle of flowering and decay is on the subject, on the other hand, the material goods that define it would be quite possible that will outlast for centuries.

Source – the series is published in a photo book.

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“Part travel diary and part love letter to the cities of Tokyo and Osaka, Jean-Vincent Simonet’s series ‘In bloom’ is a searing, hyper-visual journey into the heart of Japanese underground culture and an ode to the overwhelming experience of seeing a place with the eyes of a stranger for the first time.

For Simonet, Japan has always had an aquatic, almost mythical status. His images – of which all are original analogue photographs – are transformed through experimental manipulations; metaphors for the slow process of feeling ingested by these fluid, mutating organisms. Printing his images onto plastic paper and sculptural resin so the ink never quite dries, Simonet uses water and chemicals, long exposure and torchlight to transform the surface of his prints, abstracting and blurring them as if the scenes are melting away.”

Source – Webber Gallery

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Lynda Laird’s series ‘Dans le Noir’ – Visualizing memory and the sense of place through the contrast of grey, blue and the aggressive red of infrared film as an act of remembering the D-Day landing and the role, and the impact it had on the common people.

“The story is based on a diary of Odette Brefort, a young girl living in Deauville during the German Occupation and throughout WW2, who was a part of the French Resistance, providing military intelligence on the German defenses by drawing intricate and beautiful maps to send to her comrades in Paris. It is a 5 years diary, but I decided to narrow it down and to use only day – the D-Day landing.

I walked the coast and photographed the bunkers that formed part of the Atlantic wall along the Normandy coast from Utah beach to Deauville. They were all looking out to the sea and some of them had these paintings of trees and forests on them to disguise it.

Infrared technology was created by the military in WW2 to detect camouflage and expose a visual spectrum that is invisible to the naked eye. They used it as a means of surveillance. It is picking up anything that is alive bright red and anything that is dead, black. The vegetation reflects a large amount of infrared and the trees and the forests appeared bright red when the film was developed.

It worked quite well. But that wasn’t the plan. It was much more about the film being relevant to the work… I definitely think it’s an act of remembering to kind of get into the head space of someone that was living through it. It is something we can connect to more than the soldiers or the people that were involved in the fighting. Someone’s friend or someone’s mother to have their experience of that day, I think, is quite important.”

Source – artist statement and an article, and video in CNN Style.

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Blue Mitchell’s series ‘Chasing the Afterglow’ – exploring “the moon, the setting sun, and the dreamy lore that plays out under their spiritual light. The enchanted twilight hour, the magic under a blanket of stars, the visceral pull of the lunar phases – they ground us to nature but also allow us to transcend the everyday.

This work aims to inspire the viewer to reconnect with the power of nature, with a pinch of the mystic. The use of silver leaf and mixed media alters the nature of the two-dimensional photograph and creates a more all-encompassing experience. This technique accentuates the luminance of the subjects and gives the work a tactile, sumptuous quality.

Images are actualized by using the acrylic lift transfer process on a silver leafed panel. They are then coated with resin and displayed in custom painted frames.”

Source – artist statement.

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Dafna Talmor’s series ‘Constructed Landscapes I ‘ and “Constructed Landscape II’ – “transforms colour negatives of landscapes initially taken as mere keepsakes through the act of slicing and splicing.  The resulting photographs allude to an imaginary place, idealised spaces or as Foucault states, “a virtual space that opens up behind the surface”.

“I have always found limitations inspiring and so what was initially a cause of frustration and disappointment, led to the idea of merging different places of personal meaning to create idealised and utopian landscapes, of giving meaning and function to these seemingly defunct negatives. As a result, photographs taken over several years in my country of birth (Israel), where I was raised (Venezuela), across the UK (where I currently live) and the US (where my sister resides) have formed the basis of this ongoing project.

The act of physically merging landscapes from different parts of the world refers to the transitional aspect of our contemporary world in a metaphorical way.  Following on from my previous work, Constructed Landscapes is interested in creating a space that defies specificity, refers to the transient and to the blurring of space, memory and time.

Passing through different locations on a regular basis points to the accumulation of memories (both individual and collective). The spaces created could be anywhere, they are ‘real’ yet virtual and imaginary; they are a conflation. One could say this conflation transforms place into space, a specific place that is initially loaded with personal meaning, memories and connotations to a space that has been emptied of subjectivity and becomes universal.”

Source – artist statement.

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Philip J Brittan’s series ‘Ghosts Are Real’ – expressions of colour and abstraction about feelings experienced – the sense of a vanished world – as the representation of particular places, achieved with encompassing diverse camera methods, experimental processing, a range of styles and media, and various fine-art print making techniques.

“The work was created during a difficult period of my life. My mother had just died after struggling with illness for several months and dealing with the estate fractured my family in rancorous conflict. I escaped each evening for long, slow walks through the city and surrounding countryside. The night walks became a sort of haven, a place to recuperate from the troubles of the day. Memory is always associative; we recall not just the place itself but what it conjures in the mind. Walking, a different route each time, and often suddenly prompted by a particular place, I regularly experienced the emotional ambush that can arrive in the small hours with the past erupting into the present; welcome ghosts and lyrical memories alive with my time spent in the city, from child to adult – faces, voices, objects, music, walks, animals, stories.

The daytime traumas encouraged a bittersweet appreciation of the fragile wonders of the world, the sheer joy of the here and now, of life’s exquisite, magical pleasures. And pleasure and beauty, hopefully, finds visual purchase somewhere in the work – a reflection of the liberating freedom of the night walks and the revitalising time of recovery spent creating the images.”

The series is published in a photobook and could be viewed here.

Source – artist statement.

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Kim Boske’s series ‘I go walking in your landscape’ – “recording the landscape from different vantage points and at different moments to show the relationship between man and nature, and how we experience time and space. By combining these, layer over layer, into one image she tries to establish the essential quality of the changing reality; a quality that is lost in a simple, frozen image. In this way she investigates how our own movement through time and space influences our perspective on the world.”

Source – Noorderlicht House of Photography Archive

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Katrien de Blauwer’s ‘Painted Scenes’ – “Using pictures and photos from old magazines and papers she gives them a new narration that combines intimacy and anonymity. Her works resemble the procedures of photomontage or film editing, where the cut serves as a frame that marks the essential. The collage effects a kind of universalisation, emphasizing the impossibility to identify with a single individual, yet allowing to recognize oneself in the story. Her work deals therefore with memory. Memory by accumulation rather than by substraction.”

Source – artist profile.

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Atsushi Momoi’s series ‘A Light Leads To Another’ – “I’ve been inspired by my personal experience that some fragmentary memories are recalled irrelevantly, indeed it happens to all of us. These memories having utterly different contexts in time and space respond to each other as fragmental images in light and then they are about to connect with one light after another. While “past and there” which have been reconstructed and modified to suit “now and here ” remain and flicker, I recognize that my consciousness is composed of layers of memory.

In order to visualize this dynamic process about evocation, I shot my Mac display monitor which is randomly projecting the photographs taken by myself, a gathering of memories, by a function of slideshow. Not only through re-photographing incoherent images overlapped on a monitor, but also making use of the specific character of photography which is “save the memories” as a metaphor, I have tried to trace the form of consciousness derived of memory. My aim of this work is to reconsider the connection between the “past” memory and the phase of “now.”

Source – artist statement.

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Li Hui’s series ‘Double’ –  combing images in two as a visual communication between the nature and the human’s inner sensitivity to expose neglected fleeting moments of intimacy in our lives. Focusing on visible but overlooked details like unconscious body language, fruits or flowers patterns, using analog technique of double exposure, she creates a delicate unknown world with little stories of imagination and surreal subtle beauty to overcome social constraints.

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Bryan Graf’s series ‘The Sun Room’ – abstracts of his studio as optical investigations of the plural nature of reality through intertwined layers of a place, its emotional impact and the associative interpretations of that landscape.

“It (the studio) doubles as a solarium and a winter garden for plants and seedlings in the colder months; it’s also a point of origin for all of the experiments, series, works and failures that I have made over the years. Visual and physical traces of the room have found their way into my process. The changing light in the studio (wisteria vines have slowly overtaken the roof), the accumulation of mesh screens in the corner of the room, text from the day’s playlist of songs….it all coalesces into an ongoing visual journal of my studio practice.

I’ve come to see the camera as a sun room itself: a dark chamber that facilitates the generation of an image through the collection of light. The works all originate in a garden—a cultivation of intentional and unintentional methods of working that flow into a procession of images, all of it growing out of necessity.”

Source – artist statement (Lens Culture).

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Sasan Abri’s series ‘Sundays’ – recollecting fading memories through the visual signs and codes of flowers as a part of the eternal cycle from reality to dream and vice versa. Photographic representation of a passionate, poetic, metaphorical, yet putrefiable dream of life and death.

Source – MOHSEN Gallery

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Juanita Escobar’s project ‘ORINOCO women’s journal’ – “The setting for my story is the Orinoco River in the Colombian department of Vichada, which marks the border between rural Colombia and Venezuela…

I want to tell the stories of the women that share this territory: the indigenous woman — the Sikuani, Amorúa, Piaroa, Puinave, Curripaco and Saliva — the Venezuelan woman, the plains woman. They populate the area around this border, as nomads or sedentary inhabitants and are the ones who guide us through these territories where they are always on the move, allowing us to become part of their memory… Women have suffered the impacts of borders most severely. I have therefore decided that it is their legacy, wounds and present conditions that should be recorded in this first chapter of a project intended to be long-term…  I want to search for the visual marks left by the earth, river and jungle in the faces of the people, in their skin. I also want to look for emotions that exit the body to become landscape and atmosphere.”

Oniroco: oneiri * and Orinoco, a combination of river and dreams. Or perhaps nightmares. *In Spanish oneiri is Onirico, which is really close to the name of the river: Orinoco.

Source – artist statement.

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Daniel Mariotti’s series ‘Hello, Sunshine’ – 31 photographs taken over 31 days of journaling capture the fluctuation of how I experience depression. Even on my best days, where the world appears most vivid and colorful, depression is ever present … . It’s important to note that depression is not sadness. Sadness is a fleeting emotion tied to circumstance. Depression makes me view things indirectly; much like the photographs from this series, my focal point is a white cloud and the details are in the peripherals making it harder to see the landscape. Other days it almost blends in seamlessly… The way we perceive our world is affected by masses, both physical and emotional, that operate like gravity, pulling our attention to it, forever altering the way we interact with the world around us. Hello, Sunshine draws from Einstein’s theory of relativity, exploring the gravity of depression.”

The series is accompanied by poems and is published in a photo book.

Source – artist statement.