RED DESERT CHRONICLES
Postcards from Ravenna

Humans as a species will disappear in the due time of a geologically ephemeral lightning: it is perfectly useless, then, to stop and think about the how. phenomenons happen; things, beings and revolutions come to an end. Other than the concretionary aftermath of flames and archaic explosions mountains would hint at, and stand as, traces that long gone unfathomable civilizations left in place: our rusty beams, beached wooden ship bodies, broken glasses and rubble mounds carrying ever less colourful insignias, toxic compost towers rising for centuries against gravity trying to assault the sky offer themselves as very lousy comparisons. In the ninety-sixth fragment that made its way onto us, Eraclitus recommends to cast out corpses as fast and as fiercely as dung: it is of no consequence that life itself aspires to dust, that its very construct, inert assembled matter, needs to run further along with uncharged clock hands prior to flaking onto the formerly undreamed of same dust. And that of all of this, a photograph will only catch insensible, unavoidable light, in the instant it would glimpse through.

And those who seek for gold dig up much earth but just find a little, Eraclitus adds up. Trying to trace a history of photography, in 1931 Walter Benjamin recalls in an essay the thundering words of an austrian journalist, written about a century earlier: to try to capture fleeting mirror images is not just an impossible undertaking, the man wrote, but the very wish to do so is blasphemous. And at virillian speed we gallop three lustra into the twenty-first century, when the gaudyness and levity of the jpg and the web set the vain documentary anxiety of a species free, and images thrown swiftly as shurikens chop off your synapses n times each zeptosecond, and at times you hope that the sponge of your eye might evolve to acquire discharge ducts other than lacrimal so that it could throw up, ease down and takes its battle place again in the petronian orgy that rages on.

Rectangles are invading the culture we live in, so quite oracularly wrote the fictional Ariel Lange-Manning, when said iceberg was just shily showing its tip. And as of now you find yourself turning through the pages of a book filled up with rectangles up to the brim, possibly asking yourself about the intention and purpose of its assembly and public diffusion, in a consensus reality where rectangles invaded each one of your limbs wholesale, and the price of that sale is zero. But turning through the pages beyond these words you then become aware that the zero is not what you thought, and running through panels which are maybe as vain as all else, it becomes evident that of the invading rectangles the form and seeming suit has been kept, but there’s nothing here cutting through your meninges as a ninja star would and so, please, just stop. Stop and look.

Shooting a picture turns somebody into a photographer as slicing a salami turns him or her into a butcher, or taking a shower paves the way for competitive swimming. Art is just a word one polishes a craft with, and to master the craft of taking photographs you have to understand what slice of an instant you need to capture light as you you would wish to have it remembered as it bounces, you have to know how wide and convex a glass in front you need to sketch and define margins, you have to know the sinking well of darkness as thoroughly as the nuclear grin of the giant shining star up above in order to best define signs and signals over ever running vanishing points, and once you possess this toolbox you need to inoculate it into oblivion in order to walk around and watch, walk around and watch as an animal would, your head an empty altar ready to accomodate the tumulus you’ll pay homage to remembrance with: the zero of the brain as well as the zero of the eye. In the following panels, maneuvering around as an enchanting Fantomas, the photographer subtracts himself so skillfully and austerely from the portrayed scene, that in the course of the same gesture the whole of the species gets subtracted, leaving in its place only a mysteric requiem sang out of what was dreamed, broken and spilled, built and put in place to weigh upon the thick crust of the world, the motionless staggering of a butterfly caught in a net, tore off from its feral state just when a cruelly grinning time flailed its defeating claws around. At times to find gold you just need to gaze at the horizon. And to fill your eyes with it know the craft of enmesh it in a trap.

I keep thinking I formerly met Adriano in Florence, in nineteen ninety something, during the three days of an experimental music festival where people all over the country coordinated through a mailing list to set devices over tables and show others what those devices were teaching them. But no. This were not where I formerly met him, because we formerly met as textual ghosts, when internet was aghast with pseudonymical entities and amidst a collection of suites I wore half of logoplasm and he wore punck, and we kept coarse html scratchpads stuck somewhere to jot down listened records and existential episodes, and the machine was still running-in and the then common practice to stick pictures and then more pictures over text would have needed short of a decade to settle in, and so meeting in person still had the effect of exploring a land hic sunt leones. A big man as well as a great one, he installs upon those around him an immediate serenity, as a smiling buddha statue rising up from the stone it has been carved with, just because it needs to stretch a bit. His stare won’t pierce you as arrows and darts would but nonetheless will envelop, captivate and encapsulate as an infinite, extremely slow moving zoom would, the almost esoteric practice of pure sight, pure gaze that so exactly the following pictures, sampling through the millions he shot, are able to crystallize and show. The infinite, extremely slow moving zoom over the day the species will be done and the hard to fathom ones that will follow.

And to sculpt a stone and paint a canvas and cover paper with words you really need to stay there and hammer a chisel, stay there and daub with a brush, stay there and write. It’s even worse in photographs, where prior to shooting you have to stay there and watch after you somehow roamed there, having then the care and grace to subtract yourself from what you are framing and forget yourself as a whole, let the rapturous lightning of a moment burst free in time to deliver it to the anomalous device of an impregnable, unalterable memory. To do this one moves and lives alone like the idea of a wolf: the stark truth beyond the coats of arms of art, expression and frail mementos; lonely and forgotten businesses, like wood chunks eroded by saltiness, refinery blocks taken back by rust. Faulty footsteps of somebody passing by, whenever the sea didn’t have care to erase them millennia ago. [Might the eye evolve to its zero, Paolo Ippoliti]

In 2008 I released a record for Adriano Zanni, under the alias Punck, titled “Piallassa ( Red Desert chronicles ). The record was inspired by a coincidence which involved Adriano and Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece “The Red Desert”. The movie was shot in 1964 in the valley of Piallassa, an area north of the city of Ravenna which has a ghostly and suggestive aspect. Adriano Zanni was born in 1964 in Piallassa, and he dedicated to Antonioni’s his more personal and romantic record, built around field recordings of the area he grew up and electronic manipulation. As well as great experimental musician, Adriano is also one of my favourite photographers, with his somber style, so close to my aesthetic ideas. Fifty years after the film’s release, this collection of photos titled “Red Desert chronicles ( Postcards from Ravenna )” is the natural prosecution to Punck’s work published on record in 2008.
Whilst listening to the record evoked images from the place, these images are sounding as those empty and solitary places. [Onga, Boring Machines]

The Red Desert is the place where we live and where Adriano Zanni lives. It is Ravenna, and its surroundings. The name is due to Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie: his Red Desert has made the history of cinema in the world, but has also changed the way its inhabitants are used to perceive and describe it. For the first time, people living here had to look at their town’s image in a mirror and discover it was quite not anymore the way they thought it was. The movie was released back in 1964, the same year Adriano was born. But this coincidence cannot fully explain the craziness of the task he engaged some ten years ago: he retraced Antonioni’s photograms equipped with his camera and, even more important, a sound recorder. The result was a cd, a soundtrack sketching a landscape where chimney stacks reflect themselves in the “piallasse”, which are everglades where salt and fresh water mix as they are half lake and half sea.

Factories and nature, birds and chimneys are screechings people from here have been used to live with since the Sixties. To escape the town you just need to drive along via Baiona to find chemical industries on the right, piallasse on the left, pinewood, beach and sea at the end. In the summer it is easy. In winter, many forget about it. That is maybe one of the reasons why the pictures Adriano has been publishing every single day for more than two years in his blog in Ravenna&Dintorni have represented a date with ourselves, with something we tend to remove from our consciousness. Plus, Adriano has told us of urban suburbs such as our Darsena, the old docks, something we have been speaking for decades, waiting for a restart and a rebirth. Instead, the area is still motionless in its post-industrial decay and nobody dares to go too deeply inside it, inside those places where people used to work and are now abandoned. The same way nobody goes visiting the Circus animals off stage or stops in front of old country houses in ruins, nor in front of those objects the sea gives back to us on the shorelines after a storm. Adriano seems to pick subjects after their splendor, their use, after a metamorphosis that has changed everything around them and made them useless. He does not only shows us what is around us but we are not able to see, but also, sometimes, what we would rather not see.
In this published object, which is not a book, and where you can choose the order you like for pictures, you will find no words by Adriano, you will not find the words accompanying each picture in his blog, conditioning their interpretation, transforming each photo in a short story. In this box, on the contrary, you will find Zanni’s novel and you can choose to put it together the way you like, the output does not really change: this is the red desert today. Black and white, thin, thick, moving, touching, funny, flat, boring, always the same, always different, made of details, of crooked perspectives that tell us of a place that it is quite not the same we think it is. [Red desert Chronicles, Federica Angelini]

© Adriano Zanni | Boring Machines | Urbanautica

BY IVAN VLADISLAVIC

Ponte City dominates the Johannesburg skyline. This unavoidable 54-storey apartment building on the Berea ridge has become an icon of the city it towers over. The building has had a chequered history. Built for white sophisticates in the heyday of apartheid, it always held more appeal for young people and immigrants, for those on their way to somewhere else. During the South African transition in the early 1990s it became a refuge for black newcomers from the townships and rural areas, and then for immigrants from elsewhere in Africa. Then followed a calamitous decline, and by the turn of the century Ponte was the prime symbol of urban decay in Johannesburg, and the perceived epicentre of crime, prostitution and drug dealing.

© Installation, Le Bal, Paris, 2014

In 2007, developers evicted half the tenants and gutted the empty apartments, but their scheme to refurbish the building soon ran aground. It was in this period that Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse began working at Ponte, getting to know the tenants who remained behind, taking their portraits and photographing the life of the half-occupied block.

© Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse

In the winter of 2008, Subotzky and Waterhouse started collecting documents and other debris in the abandoned apartments. Over the following five years, they returned repeatedly to document aspects of the block, photographing every door and the view from every window. When they knocked on doors to ask permission to do this work, they were often invited in. Sitting in apartments where the televisions were tuned to South African soap operas, Congolese sitcoms, Hollywood romances and Nollywood melodramas, it sometimes felt to them that all the stories of violence and seduction they had heard about Ponte were not in the building itself but on the screens. Thus the television screens of Ponte became a third typology of apertures alongside the doors and windows: three grids arranged exactly in the sequence given by the building’s structure.

© ‘Ponte City’ by Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse, Steidl 2014

This body of images is presented here in counterpoint with items from the found archive and historical documents, including plans and photographs. The visual narrative is integrated with a sustained sequence of essays, stories and documentary texts presented in 17 booklets. With one exception, the essays and stories were written specially for this book.

Perceptions of Ponte have always been extreme, its joys and ills exaggerated equally. It has been hailed as the next big thing in urban living and derided as a suicide centre and a rubbish dump. The commentary here does not discount these myths but positions them in relation to the many other historical accounts of the building. It is an attempt to understand the unique place of the building in Johannesburg and in the popular imagination.

© Installation, South African National Gallery, 2010 

Between 2008 and 2011, Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse took a photograph out of every window in Ponte City, of every internal door, and of every television screen. This formed a part of their broader investigation of this giant residential tower block, a building that has come to symbolize the best and the worst of Johannesburg’s past, present and future. The resulting archive of over 2000 images has found form in three distinct triptych works – as lightboxes, as multi-channel projections, and as individual photographic prints.

Today life in Ponte goes on, as ordinary and extraordinary as life anywhere else. But the building is still enveloped in contending projections. It remains a focal point of the city’s dreams and nightmares, seen as refuge or monstrosity, dreamland or dystopia, a lightning rod for a society’s hopes and fears, and always a beacon to navigate by.

© Subotsky Studio

BY YEFFREY WOLIN

I came to Indiana University to teach photography after a variety of positions including police photographer in Kalamazoo and Head of Photographic services at George Eastman House in Rochester.

One of the reasons I accepted a position at Indiana was the excellent reputation of its graduate photography program, the second oldest in the country, with many famous alumni including Jerry Uelsmann, Jack Welpott, Betty Hahn, etc. I succeeded Henry Holmes Smith, the legendary teacher who wrote brilliantly about photography as art at a time when it was not at all accepted as such.

At Indiana we have been fortunate to have worked with a steady stream of students who have gone out into our field and moved it forward as artists and teachers. The thing I am proudest of is that the vast majority have continued to make their own work years after grad school whether they have taken positions as educators or professional photographers. I could compile a similar list of our undergraduates who have gained admission to top grad schools and/or made careers as photographers, museum professionals, etc. They’ve won Fulbright Fellowships; received internships at places like Magnum Photo; George Eastman House; Art Institute of Chicago; ICP; etc. I have been blessed to have been able to work with and guide so many talented and ambitious young artists.

© Jeffery Wolin, ‘Tina with New Tatoo, Pigeon Hill / Tina after the Fire, Middle Way House’, (1991/2013), (2013). From the series Pigeon Hill - Then and Now.

But the thing that has kept me at Indiana over the years has been the tremendous support the institution provides so that I can continue to make and exhibit my work. I am a photographer first and an educator second. I have been given financial resources as needed to undertake and complete my long-term projects. I am given the gift of time by way of a favorable teaching schedule and sabbatical leaves. Photography has helped shape my life and given it meaning. It has provided me with a source of income and a measure of my experiences.

Although I spent my first two years in college studying math and science, I graduated from Kenyon with a major in English literature, concentrating in particular on American literature from Herman Melville to Kurt Vonnegut. Another influence on my work is film. In college I was introduced to the classics of cinema—Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut. So the idea of narrative and art runs deep in me. And I had access to an old Chandler & Price printing press and kind of taught myself the basics of letterpress, printing books of poetry by authors I admired.

I went to RIT because I thought it would be the best place to combine my interest in photography and book making. They started me off in Typography 1 and I worked my way through all the classes in book arts they offered from history of typefaces to papermaking and bookbinding. My thesis was a handmade book of my photographs and writings. I still love books of all kinds, even in the age of the Kindle.

© Aaron Siskind, American, (1903-1991)

While working on my thesis I got a job at the Eastman House as a photographer and printer. Somewhere in there I got promoted to Head of Photographic services and wound up staying for almost five years. I got to print Lewis Hine’s glass plate negatives, Alvin Langdon Coburn’s negatives, some of Aaron Siskind’s “Harlem Document”. And we had total access to the archives where I really encountered the history of photography. At the time my work was strongly influenced by Eugene Atget and especially the Man Ray collection of Atget at GEH. I went through old technical books in the library to figure out the gold-toned POP process that Atget used. I was working with large format cameras and making contact prints using sunlight. And I had the great good fortune to become friends w/ Andre Kertesz and to spend time with him for a few years before he died. He welcomed young photographers to his apartment above Washington Square Park in NY and shared his passion for photography and life with me.

But despite my love of narrative and photography I had pretty much bought into the late modernist approach to art, which dominated photographic circles at the time I was a student. Even though I had a literature background and some experience as a writer, I avoided linking my photography and writing at that point.

© Sister Gertrude Morgan, Jesus Christ The Lamb of God and His Little Bride, 1960

In 1985 or so, we had a show at our Fine Arts Gallery at IU of work by “folk” artists Howard Finster and Sister Gertrude Morgan. I loved the way they wrote their visions into the positive space of their drawings and paintings. I realized that was something I could try with my own photographs. And so I picked up a pen and violated the canons of modernist photography by violating the pictorial space of my photographs. I began with a portrait of my father, which was later purchased by MoMA, the Hallmark Collection (now at the Nelson-Atkins Museum), Houston Museum of Fine Arts and Indiana University Art Museum—so the entire edition of four wound up in good hands. It also confirmed my new direction.

And I began to explore memories of my youth searching for possible stories that I could combine with existing photographs that triggered recollections of key moments from my past. For example, after college I wound up in Europe studying photography in art school in Antwerp—it was my first formal art training. This was in 1972 and the war in Vietnam was still raging on. I made a photo/text piece using an x-ray of my head (the result of a basketball injury) that refers to steps my friends took to avoid Vietnam and the luck I had in a special lottery we all had to take part in to determine which of us would be drafted and which of us would be allowed to go on with our normal lives. The resulting image was a death mask that simultaneously signified my birth as an artist. It was acquired by Graham Nash—fitting since the music of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young provides part of my mental soundtrack of this time period.

© Jeffrey Wolin, Police days, 1987. 

Another photo/text piece: After I returned to the US and before I went to grad school I got a job in the crime lab in the Kalamazoo police department. My two-year stint as a police photographer was quite formative (you can listen to the video ‘Written in memory: Jeffrey Wolin at TED x Bloomington’ from here). At IU years later, I photographed the head of an executed murderer, which had been donated to the biology department at IU where I found it in a specimen room. The text, written directly onto the print, related several of the most tragic and gruesome things I had witnessed years earlier as a police photographer.

A few years after I arrived in Bloomington, Indiana to teach at Indiana University, an IU student named Ellen Marks was brutally killed. The murder took place on the west side of town, on a bluff known as “Pigeon Hill.” It contains the Crestmont Housing Projects for people who qualify for Section 8 housing. It is also the site of many small bungalows and shotgun shacks right out of Walker Evans’ “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” The legendary artist, Jerry Uelsmann, once told me he photographed up on the Hill when he first came to Bloomington to study photography in the ‘60’s. Jack Welpott did too.

© Jerry Uelsmann, Untitled (Pigeon Hill, Bloomington, Indiana), 1958-59

I used to pass the area when I drove to my car repair shop and when Ellen Marks was murdered I decided to explore Pigeon Hill with my camera. As I got to know the residents through my photographs, they would tell me more and more about their lives. I wrote their stories directly onto their portraits in silver or black ink. I became known for this particular style of combining image and text. And I had worked my way down from large format view cameras using natural light to medium format cameras with flash.

At the time I began photographing on Pigeon Hill, there was a lot of discussion about crime and poverty—it was the beginning of the crack epidemic. And there was a lot of talk about reforming welfare. I had something of a personal interest in this discourse: my father was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan into extreme poverty. This was before the New Deal—there was no social safety net. He and his four brothers moved frequently with my grandmother from apartment to apartment when she couldn’t pay the rent. My dad was never able to overcome his humble origins even as he moved up in the world. I wanted to better understand the dynamic of poverty and how it affects people, especially children.

"Tyke" Allen, Pigeon Hill, 1989
"I remember Pigeon Hill as the perfect place to grow up in. This photograph reminds me of all the fun my friends and I had riding our bikes and playing war. I didn’t have a bunch of responsibilities back then. There are some days when I wish I could go back to that childhood time and place."

I admired the community aspects of the housing projects—people truly helped each other, knew their neighbors and helped raise each other’s kids. Everyone had large groups of friends and big extended families. But after a while I began to grow disillusioned about the prospects for the future of the people I had gotten to know, especially the children. Many teenagers were having children of their own and the cycles of poverty were being perpetuated. I needed to take a break from the series.

In 1991, I received a Guggenheim Fellowship for my photo/text work including the autobiographical pieces and the Pigeon Hill portraits. With a whole year off from teaching I decided to pursue two new projects: portraits of Holocaust survivors and portraits of Vietnam War veterans. I handled both the same way—I began each session with a videotape interview and then made portraits with my still camera trying to infuse aspects of the narrative into the visual structure of the photographs. By the end of that year, I decided to pursue the Holocaust survivor series and set aside the Vietnam War vets. The survivors were aging and dying and working with them seemed more pressing.

© Jeffrey A. Wolin from the series Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust

In 1997, Chronicle Books published “Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust” to accompany my exhibition which opened at ICP in New York and eventually traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago and other museums in the US as well as Zurich, Warsaw and Krakow. It became part of a larger traveling exhibition organized by Pierre Bonhomme of Paris that was shown in museums in France, Italy and Spain. The work began to resonate outside of art circles—e.g. I was the lead story on the 11 o’clock Polish national news—I got to see myself on TV with my voice dubbed into Polish. As a result I have no idea what I said to the Polish people. The President of Switzerland sent a long letter apologizing for not being able to attend my opening in Zurich. So it was interesting to see how that work interacted with the wider societies, due to its subject matter and the timing of internal political debates. I’ve always thought artists should engage as wide an audience as possible. It’s another reason I like to get my work out in book form in addition to exhibitions.

By 2003, I was ready to get back to the Vietnam veterans series. The war in Iraq, which had just broken out, probably spurred me on. I began to contact some of the veterans I had worked with a decade earlier. One had just died—he drank himself to death. Others had moved away. I located and re-photographed several and began to rebuild my contacts. And by now I was working with medium format color scanned to digital output.

I worked for a while with vets in and around Bloomington and then decided to expand the project, first, to the rest of Indiana; then to cities nearby, especially Chicago, and finally I worked with veterans from coast to coast: from New York to California and from Wisconsin to Alabama.

© Jeffrey A. Wolin, installation view ‘Inconvenient Stories’, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago

The exhibition, “Inconvenient Stories: Portraits of Vietnam War Veterans” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago with an accompanying book by Umbrage Editions. Rather than writing directly on the prints as in earlier series, I made text panels with the war stories printed typographically to reference war memorials. Below is an incredibly moving story by John Linnenemeier, one of the vets I worked with who became a close friend. His story is filled with self-reflection on what it means at a fundamental level to be human and how war can force one to address the most primal issues of life and death and love. It is a story of healing and of reconciliation. His portrait contains visual references to travel, to the passing of time and spirituality.

Twenty years later I did go back to Vietnam and I got a chance to experience the country and the people from an utterly different perspective. For me it was not any kind of pilgrimage. I just travel a lot. I love Southeast Asia. You can rent a car and share the expenses and have a driver—it’s the best way to see the country.

We went up the coast and met a guy who was a Vietnam veteran. I could tell there was something quite extraordinary about the scene because the guy was sitting there—he had screwed up arms, screwed up legs. He’d hit a mine or something—he was in bad shape. But he was surrounded by these Vietnamese people and it was almost palpable—you could feel the love. It was just coming in on this guy. He had a little kid on his lap; girls were sitting around; old guys there. You could tell they loved this guy. I started talking to him and he said, ‘I got home and I was bitter, angry and for years and years and years I was just pissed off all the time. I’ve come back here and now I’m working on this project where we’re putting solar energy in this hospital in My Lai. And I feel at peace here.’ And he said, ‘Look, I don’t know if it’s doing any good really.’

© Jeffrey Wolin, ‘Owen Mike U. S. Marine Corps Lance Corporal Summer 1968-March 1970’, from the series Inconvenient Stories: Vietnam War Veterans

But I thought, ‘Man, I don’t know if you’re making any electricity but you are doing the job; you are binding up the wounds. You’re a hero because I can smell that you are bringing people back together. You replaced hate with love.’

And we talked and talked and talked through the night and finally the thing was breaking up and he said, ‘Where are you going tomorrow?’ And I said, ‘We’re going up north to the DMZ.’ He said, ‘I got one suggestion: Go to My Lai.’

The next day we were driving in the van. There’s really only one good road that goes up the spine of Vietnam. There was a dirt road that teed off and our driver stopped and said, ‘My Lai is down that way about twenty klicks.’ And there were five of us and two said they wanted to go and two said they didn’t want to go and so I was it—I was the deciding vote. I don’t go for old battle sites—I don’t have enough imagination or something so I know I wouldn’t have gone but I respected that fellow’s opinion. So I said, ‘Yeah, let’s go.’

So we drove there and got to the place and we walked in through this arch and the whole area was covered with flowers someone had planted. It was just a field of flowers. And I didn’t even know I had all that sadness in me because I broke down, uncontrollably, just seeing all those flowers. I really didn’t think I needed any resolution but I guess I must have and I was glad for that. And whoever planted those flowers, I salute them, because that’s what you have to do.

© Jeffrey Wolin, ‘James Claude Arnold U. S. Navy E-4 July 1966-February 1968’, from the series Inconvenient Stories: Vietnam War Veterans

At one of the museum openings for “Inconvenient Stories”, John asked me if I ever thought of photographing and interviewing “the other side”— Vietnamese Army veterans. But I wondered how I would find Vietnamese veterans. And I didn’t speak Vietnamese. Nevertheless, that conversation planted a seed and started me on what became the sequel: portraits and interviews of Vietnamese veterans.

I began by photographing ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) veterans here in the US at the suggestion of the Vietnamese American artist, Dinh Le. These were our former allies from South Vietnam who either fled in 1975 when Saigon fell or were sent by the North Vietnamese to “re-education camps” for years before emigrating. Some were “boat people” who fled on overcrowded, barely sea-worthy craft. Sometimes they were attacked by Thai pirates. There are over a million Vietnamese living in America, largely as a consequence of the war.

© Dinh Q. Lê, Doi Moi (NapalMeD Girl), 2006

In December 2007, accompanied by John Linnemeier, I visited Vietnam for the first time and had a chance to photograph and interview “the other side”—North Vietnamese Army veterans of the American War (as it is called in Vietnam to distinguish it from the French War, the Japanese War, etc.) The faces I photographed and the stories I heard, not surprisingly, revealed a very different picture of the war than one hears from the American vets.

John Linnemeier and I returned to Vietnam together a year later—this time we stayed in the south, where most battles were fought. I photographed and interviewed North Vietnamese Army veterans, guerrillas, veterans of local militias and civilians whose misfortune it was to be caught in the crossfire. Some witnessed massacres in their villages. But everyone treated us with warmth and curiosity and respect. The NVA veterans loved meeting John and they would show each other the scars from their war wounds, wondering if they were ever in a situation where they shot at each other and then laugh and hug.

© Jeffrey Wolin, ‘Ho Phuc Ngon Vietnam People’s Army Lieutenant Colonel’, from the series Vietnam Veterans: Portraits of the Other Sides

I became increasingly interested in the way the lives of the veterans from the opposing armies became intertwined because of the war. The new larger project that emerged, “From All Sides” opened in Lyon, France as part of the Photo Biennale, Lyon Septembre de la Photographie, in 2010. In the gallery, the veterans from the three different armies were interwoven based upon interconnectedness of their stories and/or visual relationships.

© Jeffrey Wolin, ‘Nguyen Van Phuoc Civilian near the DMZ in Quang Tri’, from the series Vietnam Veterans: Portraits of the Other Sides

And finally, to end with my current work, several years ago the front page of our local newspaper featured another gruesome murder. A 29-year woman named Crystal Grubb was reported missing and then her body was found in a cornfield just north of town. In that 29-year old face I immediately recognized one of the kids from Pigeon Hill that I had photographed 20 years earlier. I located her mother and gave her the portraits I had made of her daughter as a child. She told me of Crystal’s last days, of her abusive boyfriend who was arrested for cooking meth the night of Crystal’s disappearance. And I realized it was time to revisit Pigeon Hill and see if I could find the people I had photographed a generation earlier to learn how their lives had turned out.

© Jeffery Wolin, ‘Crystal with her Aunt Judy, Pigeon Hill / Judy Holding Portrait of Crystal after her Murder, Acadia Court’, 1991/2013), (2013), from the series  Pigeon Hill - Then and Now.

Obviously I couldn’t photograph Crystal again, so I had her Aunt Judy hold a portrait of Crystal from two decades earlier and recount the story of Crystal’s murder. It eerily paralleled that of Ellen Marks whose murder had brought me up to the Hill in the first place 25 years earlier. Although I am using a medium format digital camera now, I am endeavoring to match the look of the earlier selenium toned, gelatin silver prints photographs made from negatives. I like a certain level of ambiguity as we look forward and backward in time. It helps raise more questions about the nature of memory.

I had to visit a maximum-security prison to photograph one of the people I had photographed years earlier as a kid. His crime was failure to pay child support. The US has the highest rate of incarceration of any nation on earth. We put people in jail at nearly twice the rate of Russia; seven times that of France. It’s a national disgrace, related to the privatization of prisons and the failed war on drugs.

© Jeffery Wolin, ‘Timmy, Pigeon Hill / Timothy, Wabash Valley Correctional Facility’, (1991/2013), (2012) from the series Pigeon Hill - Then and Now

After four years between 1987-1991 and the past four years, “Pigeon Hill: Then and Now” opened at la galerie le Bleu du Ciel in Lyon, France and was shown at Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago this past winter (Artist talk video from here) .  We paired the then and now images side by side—we also screened a video with interviews we did of eight of the people in the series discussing their own responses to the photographs, past and present. Viewers can draw their own conclusions about the underlying issues of class, poverty, nature/nurture, aging, trauma, memory, etc.

Although these issues are embedded in this series, my main interest is in the faces themselves, especially when juxtaposed with the earlier portraits. One can see the effects of the passing of time and the ways in which life’s experiences (good and bad) are written into these open and expressive faces.

© Jeffery Wolin, ‘Tina with Jay, Pigeon Hill / Tina with Logan, Pigeon Hill’, (1988/2013), (2012) from the series Pigeon Hill - Then and Now

Biography

Jeffrey A. Wolin is Ruth N. Halls Professor of Photography and Director of the Center for Integrative Photographic Studies at Indiana University School of Fine Arts, where he served as Director from 1994-2002. He has been awarded two Visual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for his photographs with text.

His work has been exhibited in over 75 solo and group shows in the US and Europe since 1990 including Houston Museum of Fine Arts; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; George Eastman House, Rochester; Corcoran Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Wolin’s series of portraits of Holocaust survivors, Written in Memory: Portraits of the Holocaust, was published by Chronicle Books, accompanying solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago; International Center of Photography, New York; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Indianapolis Museum of Art and Haus Bill in Zurich, Switzerland. Work from this series was included in Mémoire des Camps, which opened at Hotel de Sully in Paris and traveled to Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Palazzo Magnani, Italy; and Museu Nacional d’Art, Barcelona, Spain.

Wolin’s solo exhibition of portraits of Vietnam War Veterans opened at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago in 2005. Umbrage Editions of New York published an accompanying book, Inconvenient Stories: Vietnam War Veterans. Wolin traveled to Vietnam twice to photograph Vietnamese war veterans and expanded the project to include all sides of the war. From All Sides: Portraits of American and Vietnamese War Veterans premiered at the Photo Biennale, Lyon Septembre de la Photographie in 2010.

Wolin’s work is included in numerous monographs and other books including Swimmers, Aperture, New York; Waterproof, Editions Stemmle, Zurich; An American Century of Photography, Abrams, New York; Searching for Memory, Basic Books, New York; Common Ground, Merrell, London & New York; and Mémoire des Camps, Editions Marval, Paris.

His photographs are in the permanent collections of many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Houston Museum of Fine Arts; Art Institute of Chicago; New York Public Library, New York; International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Bibliotèque Nationale de France, Paris; and Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Jeffrey A. Wolin is represented by Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago.

© Jeffrey Wolin 

BY STEVE BISSON

The journey begun during the recent years by Andrea Alessio through his own “where”, coinciding approximately with that geographic region called Veneto, satisfies first of all this need to realize, to direct the mind in such a way to perceive better what is important in us. In this sense the journey is a re-birth path that can just start nearby, from what we do not see or we do not want to see anymore.

In this sense, Andrea Alessio’s choice to start the re-discovery of his own ‘territory’ through the Christmas decorations and their unsuspectable shining a light in the dark of the most common places is brilliant. His patient night visions derive from this need to shine a light on his own experiences. (On this project and book Before You, Santa Claus, Life Was a Moonless Night published by Nazraeli Press I wrote before here).

The following stages of this journey lead us from the Venetian plain with its factories and scattered houses, to the most solitary mountain landscapes, in which the relationship between solids and voids, between what is and what is not, is sharper and more marked in the photography, also for the use of white and black. In the infinite snows of Misurina, collected in the Apollo 19 album, in which Andrea Alessio sketches the features of a Martian space deceiving the reason by widening the borders; then in the Vajont, where he tries his “reconstruction”, by investigating not so much for the remains of the memory as the sensations before time, before that dramatic moment, October 9th, 1963, at 10.39 PM, sweeping away almost 2,000 people during the sleep. The photographer reminds us for a moment, that the mountain, a symbol of union between sky and earth, does not always aid the awareness by the human being of his position in the universe.

Finally the Dolomites. The story highlights another basic element of the poetic view by Andrea Alessio. The distance or what I would call more philosophically the right measure. It becomes the interpretation necessary to open the project and to explain the relationship with the context. The author looks for an optimal scale to bring the mountain closer to its possible dimensions. Somehow, you perceive the desire to hide any reference from the observer. The message is clear: the mountain does not exist, just what we are able to grasp of it exists. Of course, the façade of the Dolomite peaks is hard, compact and impenetrable. This rock is so much that it seems to us that we may have it between the teeth and chew it. However, sooner or later, the details appear on the surface. A fir challenging the high altitude, a pole driven in the stone, a child climbing on his hands. Suddenly this uniform mass starts slowly to distinguish itself, to reveal its life, as if it were a projection of our same existence. As we gain confidence, it seems to us almost that we may own it. So, it can even happen that we joke by mistaking the face of one of these Dolomites for the profile of Garibaldi, Verdi or Karl Marx. This is of little importance. What is important is the effort taking us there.

In all these works you breathe a great ground silence, necessary to think and to obtain suggestions from the inner whispers. It seems to me that Andrea Alessio has stopped to pursue the past. All his meetings with his “where” gives shape to a new personal interpretation. Light, space and time are words that the author makes vibrate to call the definition into question and to look for a meaning out of the pure objectivity. Now there is nothing we can do but wait for his descent from the mountain towards the sea.

© Andrea Alessio | Urbanautica

BY DIETER DEBRUYNE

1.Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?

Before I took up photography I was involved in painting and poetry. I realised my prose at that time was extremely depictive and mood-setting … the step towards photography was quite logical. I travelled solo to Istanbul, experimenting with myself, a 7 days trip, the city was cold, there was snow. The experience was existential. I wandered through the city with just a camera and a dictaphone as companions. Trying to catch the darker side of Istanbul. From that moment on I was hooked on photography.

© Peter Waterschoot

2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?

I took up art school, at 33 it was a ‘late vocation’. Started out with black and white. Liked it a lot. Days in the dark room. Until somebody told me I had made pictures in the style of a certain Dirk Braeckman. Dark and texture-driven. I didn’t know his work at that time. It was very difficult for me discovering this masterly, deeply erotic oeuvre with a fetish for ‘dusty interiors’. After that I tried everything to get away from this kind of images, luckily digital came. Colour came. I did what a student does. Experiment. Investigate. Stopped photographing even. Took up boxing classes. Worked my anger out. Got to the core. It was only when I took up again the last year of my photographic education that I made a clean break with experiments in daytime photography. I decided to dig deeper into the colour-palette of nighttime photography combining it with my literary bagage ( as a young adolescent I read too much, especially triggered by darker literature and dystopic themes – e.g. 1984 by George Orwell was one my favourite books.). And most of all; a given loneliness is very important in the creation of my images.

© Peter Waterschoot

3. What were the courses that you were passionate about and which have remained meaningful for you?

My own free work, and writing about photography. I still like writing about photography. Also for other artists.

4. Any professor or teacher that has allowed you to better understand your work?

The professor who pointed out to me that I am a way better photographer when I work with exclusion in my images. The tension created by absence. It enabled me to turn back to the beginning of my photography. I didn’t lose my time anymore trying to find my way in a documentary style. No more trying differents approaches. I dropped daytime photography altogether. Once chosen this path. Much more into the plastic arts. I felt the urge to create a very own ‘athmospheric’ approach, with a very personal colour palette. Nighttime photography. Landscapes, and a lot of ‘suffocating’ interiors, and I started calling it ‘Neon poetry’. I dare to say that I have appropriated certain monochrome colour palettes, varying from blacks and reds and greens and browns up to the blue of the ‘blue hour’. The images are disturbing but comforting at the same time. A melancholic horror – with a soft edge.

© Peter Waterschoot

5. What do you think about photography in the era of digital? 

Digital photography allows me to work the way I do. I work very intensive on series. I put al lot of effort in it. But I need to combine my work as a photographer with a regular day job in order to pay the bills. Sometimes it really hurts. But that’s life. Still waiting for my first maecenas I guess. Anyways. It would be impossible to work this intensive and spend time in the darkroom. Nevertheless, after digital selection, printing remains of the utmost importance to me. I want the photoworks to work as objects, I want them to be tangible. I want them to add space to a room. In my latest show people told me they felt a strong urge to touch the pictures. This made me very happy. That’s what it’s all about. If I see a great sculpting I know that I see something great when I feel the urge to touch it.

© Peter Waterschoot

6. And what about social networking? 

Social networks have given me the opportunity to get in touch with many marvellous artists whose work I appreciate. I like organizing events, I like pushing artistic photography, and social media are very helpful in this, you can move a lot quicker.
The downside is the fact that sometimes it is a bit discouraging when you see how much artistic photography there is on the market and realizing you must shout really really loud, and put efforts into your social media marketing to get heard amidst this ‘murmur’, and self promotion is the part of the job I really don’t like.

© Peter Waterschoot

7. About your work now. How would you describe your personal research in general? 

A quest for the poetic, as I call it myself ‘neon poetry’ with dystopian inclinations, slightly erotic with a strong fetish for relics of the past ( hotels, cinema’s, theatres, harbours, etc.), it’s all about a fading past but at the same time there’s a slight sci-fi feeling in it.

8. Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?

I work with a Canon 5D. ‘A black one’. It ‘s almost breaking down now. I made a shift from horizontal framing to vertical which I discovered I like vertical a whole lot more because it’s more effective to work with exclusion. I got only one lense left. Gave away the other ones. A 40 mm. lens is my all time buddy now .

© Peter Waterschoot

9. Tell us about your latest work

I finished art school when I was about 39. Now I’m 44. Time is going fast. I went through a personal existential crisis, needing to decide on having a kid or not, I was very much afraid parenthood would destroy my photographical quest ( in the meantime it turned ut t o be a ’ yes I do’, a wonderful son is born 2 weeks ago! ). But, at that time, I really needed a very big walkabout. I needed reflecting. I needed loneliness, confronting myself, evaluating my ‘cultural bagage’. This sent me on travels towards lesser star hotels on an axis from Venice up to Hamburg. I spent several days in each of these hotels trying to capture ‘neon poetry’ in single images, I used to call it ‘a mental documentary’ on a fading Europe, but that is not correct. It is all about me. It is all about a quest for a certain aesthetics.

© Peter Waterschoot

10 Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, that influenced you in some way?

My favourites at this point in time are Calin Kruse, Lieko Shiga, Daisuke Yokota, I like what Armand Quetsch is doing, I like what Pierre Liebaert is doing, I like what Alisa Resnik and Boris Eldagsen are doing. Dark and poetic. (But I must say my own photography stands apart from that, it is differently tapped into a symbolic singularity, closer to a faint mysticism). I adore Todd Hido. I adore Dolores Marat. Influences (in a strange way ) still are Daido Moriyama and Anders Petersen. In literature: Junichiro Tanazaki ( in praise of Shadow), Mishima, J.K. Huysmans. In film: Exotica ( Egoyan), Blade Runner, Naked Lunch, Fallen Angels (W.K.Wai), all film noir etc.

© Peter Waterschoot

11. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?

Lieko Shiga in FOAM 2 years ago.

12. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?

I want to make a book with the collected material I am sitting on ( a database on which I have worked the last 2 years ), but I am still looking for funding and /or a publisher. I am making contacts with models (yes!) to start on a new body of work, which will continue the quest for ‘neon poetry and the exotic’.

© Peter Waterschoot | Urbanautica - Belgium

BY STEVE BISSON

1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?

My interest about photography started when I realized that it could be possible to take pictures with an aim beyond the aesthetic. Particularly I remember a series that was taken in the abandoned home of my father’s uncle. This was the first time I worked with a group of images about the same subject. These black and white pictures with a simple composition were developed in my precarious first laboratory.

2.How did your research evolve with respect to those early day?

These early days were mainly concerned with experimentation and learning and in this respect little has changed. I continue learning and trying to retain the curiosity of those days.

What has changed is my interest about certain topics, which are related with my life experience. Through time I have worked at defining a photographic language that allows me to recognize myself as the author.

3. You have studied at Visual Arts Academy Martín A. Malharro, Mar del Plata, Argentina. How this experience influenced your career as photographer? Any professor or special course in your memories?

Studying in the Visual Arts Academy Martín A. Malharro was an outstanding experience. I would highlight how enriching the opportunity was to be exposed to, besides photography, other expressive media such as painting, etching, drawing and sculpture. I remember two professors with very different personal works who have become part of me or at least I like to believe that each image I take contains something from them. Pepe Fernandez Balado who worked mainly with B&W photography and was able to communicate great emotions throughout small details in excellent prints developed in his own laboratory, and Raul La Cava who expresses himself with a ironic and casual style by means of a color series and introduced me to contemporary photography.

4. You now live and work in Berlin. How this shift has affected your photography and your personal research?

I always had a lot of curiosity and interest to subjects related to contemporary history, art history, sociology, anthropology, urbanism, geography, etc… I have been always interested in the immediate environment with that I interact and which influences my photography but mainly my life. I left my country of origin 14 years ago and although the relationship with the cities I have lived in have not defined the topics directly that interest me as an author,they certainly have influenced them. In general, I try to know the cities where I live through photography, with the aim to understand the environment as a place to inhabit in the best way.

What has influenced mostly my work in Berlin, was the unknown and unfamiliar city structure that I tried to assimilate and where big natural spaces are mixed with extreme monotonous blocks of buildings. This mixture offers spaces where the impersonal and the authentic, the foreseeable and the disturbing are experienced at the same time.

5. You work explores cities as a reflection space that refers to the contemporary citizen and their relationship with the environment. Tell us about the project ‘No man’s land’. How did you feel about this space and its history?

'No man’s land' Project is focused on the portion of land right next to the Wall dividing Berlin for nearly three decades. This piece of land was converted to an exclusive military zone. Currently these spaces seem like ordinary places but they have a special emotional charge that is directly linked to recent European history. Personally it was a strange experience. On one hand this emotional charge motivated me at a conceptual and aesthetic level to develop the project. On the other, I could not help but feel a great unease about the existence of other walls at present which are evidence of a collective failure reminding us ofwhat we still have to learn.

6. Nature or better relations with it within the city is a central topic in your photographic research. How should photography be used to improve town planning and to build more liveable cities?

I’m not sure how photography could be used to improve the cities at least in a direct way. I believe that photography due to its own characteristics, allows us to have an excellent perspective from which to reflect upon how we build our homes as part of society. It is said that we are what we build. Through photography we can better understand how we are. Perhaps, from this starting point we could continue the wise choices and never repeat the mistakes.

7. The projects ‘Inhabit Fedora’ has been selected for the new edition of the exhibition “Naturae” which is centered on the experience of space, especially through nature. Tell us about how the photographic medium is involved in the perception of space, or rather in its awareness?

Photography as medium always offers an arbitrary summary, a small piece of something wider. This summary is immediately assimilated and understood in a natural way by the viewers who link it with their own experiences. Therefore, I believe that we become aware of space in a reflexive manner since the photographic medium suggests much more than it shows.

8. Three books of photography that you recommend in relation to the experience of space.

I would like to cite three recent books: ’Almost There’ by Aleix Plademunt; ’Ostalgia’ by Simona Rota; ’Pearl’ by Tiago Casanova.

9. Projects that you are working on and plans for the future?

Nowadays I am finishing the edition of my first photography book about my last project ‘Sometimes We Have No Shadow’ thanks to the Folio Award received last May in the Photo Art Barcelona Festival. We are working to present it next October along with an exhibition in The Folio Club, Barcelona. In parallel, I began to take photographic notes about different subjects that I would like to develop in the near future.

© Juan Margolles | urbanautica

BY STEVE BISSON

1. Let’s start from your next exhibition opening in Auckland ‘Social Realism’ at Sanderson contemporary art that, as Mark Amery put “it is all in essence sculpture”. A statement that helps to read your experimental research, although a bit paradoxically…

My video practice began from sculpture in an unpredictable way. I began using 3D software in the early nineties for visualizing public art proposals when I lived in NYC. When I moved to NZ in ‘95, my opportunities for public art dried up (I was still asked to be a finalist, but most told me I was too far away, when I said I had moved for good). Nevertheless I continued to work with the 3D software, 3D Studio. It is also animation software. The experiments in 3D animation led to video which we incorporated into my teaching practice within our sculpture major.

© Brit Bunkley, ‘Stalin (AP)’, 2014

2. Some of your latest works include use of 3d scanning technologies in continuity with previous digital sculpturing works. What drove you to test these technologies as a possible mean of depiction? How has the quick evolution of this tool affected your research?

Between 2002 and 2006 I contributed 3D printed artwork and video animation to Siggraph art exhibitions where I was also able to use the latest 3D scanning technology. In the last couple of years, photogrammetry 3D scanning (using photographs to determine X,Y,Z virtual 3D space) has arrived at the point where the resolution can almost compete against expensive laser scanners …under the right conditions. I have been learning to scan them in using this method with Agrisoft’s Phtotoscan. Sometimes the conditions are poor (low lighting and obstacles) so that the resolution is not great. However in some ways the imperfect scans are more interesting than high resolution ones in that they create ghostly images and dreamlike animations.

My project had two facets. One was to scan and transform classical and neoclassical sculpture and architecture, and then transform them (e.g. bend, stretch, cut holes or place a giant cockroach on top of). When scans were not available, I would model or even purchase 3D virtual models and scans. Some 3D digital models are available for free on-line.

© Brit Bunkley, ‘La révolution est terminée Je suis la révolution’, 2014

Artist Oliver Laric won a Contemporary Art Society Annual Award that supports a UK museum to work with an artist of their choice to commission a new work. Their new work was simply to make high resolution high quality 3D scans of their collection and make it available on line. I used several. So for instance I inscribed in 3D software in French a famous quote by Napoleon “The Revolution is Over; I am the Revolution” inscribed digitally on the cheeks of a scanned bust of Napoleaon by Antoine Denis Chaudet.

The other facet was to scan in building and sculpture that had already been transformed by acts of violence. They included a local monument whose statue of a controversial figure was knocked off the base, a preserved wall and colonnade in Berlin riddled by bullets and shrapnel from WW2, and the Auschwitz-Brikenau gate.

3. You recently completed an artist residency in Berlin. Tell us about it? What have you worked on, and what has attracted your attention of the city?

I had been attracted to Berlin since the cold war days, reading John le Carré and Ian Fleming novels since I was about 10. And of course I was curious to see what all the recent “Berlin as the new art centre” hoopla was about. The art is indeed fabulous.

Berlin was also a short train ride to Prague, the home of Kafka (and occasional capital of the Hapsburg Empire). Auschwitz was another overnight train-ride way. I have been mildly obsessed with Auschwitz for years. I never understood why. It is such a weirdly abject place, but I am not Jewish and felt uncomfortable using it in my art. It somehow seemed to be the perfect icon of evil- with the Birkenau Gate looking like a giant face, a motif that I unwittingly put in one on my early public sculptures in NYC, Gate Mask.

© Brit Bunkley, ‘Gate Mask’, NYC, 1984

(And my wife said I must have been there in a past life… that’s why I like to eat so much now…) I intuited some sort of link between Berlin, Prague, Kafka and Birkenau that I attempted to find resolution in “Kafka’s Sisters” regarding his sisters who all died in the Holocaust, one at Auschwitz. “Paradox of Plenty” is an economic phrase normal associated with corrupt third world states, but it also is apt for developed nations as well.

I continued the “floating monuments” theme begun in the first Paradox of Plenty in this new version but instead used neo gothic and neoclassical monuments of power instead of modernist ones. The escape away from humanity’s hubris to outer space has been an ongoing filmic theme for many years. The giant cockroach also seemed appropriate in clips of Kafka’s residences (a theme, also borrowed from earlier work - giant insects, a post nuclear cliché). The cockroach is usually attributed as the Ungeziefer or “vermin” of his famous novella Metamorphosis. Kafka was the David Lynch of his era who practically invented the Eastern European version of Magic Realism – as genre combining horror, humour and surreal fantasy. 

© Brit Bunkley, still from the video ‘Paradox of Plenty. Futurology’, 2011

4. I first met your works through the videos. What struck me from the start is that they work as a mirror of the human ability to manipulate reality. Somehow it is like a magnifying glass on certain mass phenomena as fears and phobias of society. While the technology on the one hand gives us more confidence about what we were, somehow makes us feel rationally better, on the other hand, however, we are increasingly uncertain and unprepared about the future. How did you get first to videos and what motivates you of this medium?

I fell into video in the late 90’s when experimenting with 3D Studio software that I originally used for sculpture design. As mentioned earlier, it is a software used primarily for developing games and animation. The cinematic resolution and scale of video remains one of the more exciting developments in contemporary art. I have been lucky enough to have seen many thousands of video work and installation internationally since 2000 when I took students to the Sydney Biennial, which I wrote into our sculpture programme. The biennale as others is made up primarily of video art. I also saw many fine examples in LA, San Francisco and NYC during annual trips to visit family in New England. The immersive quality of a good video installation cam be transformative like no other medium.

© Brit Bunkley, still from the video ‘The Huntsman’, 2013

5. Filmessay has invited you to a special streaming session of your video works. Which video will you present? How do you rate this opportunity offered by the Internet to reach a potentially large audience through an artistic work, such as a video? In some ways it is as if certain distances were reduced. It is a bit like a book that you take home to read it. How to compare this type of experience with entering a physical installation? Will we enter 3d installations in the future?

The works will be: ‘Fleeced’, ‘Huntsman’, ‘Paradox of Plenty – the Classical (Kafka’s Sisters)’, ‘By Blood and Water, By Blood and Sand’, ‘Downbreak on 1, Upbeat on 2’. 
The internet can provide reasonably high quality resolution video that can be played back at any scale anywhere with good broadband. (I keep my streamed video at 720p in case one doesn’t have great broadband – Also 1080p versions are for sale at Sanderson gallery.)
Entering a physical installation can be a stunning experience. In May I saw several excellent video installations at the Sydney Biennial, Douglas Gordon’s collaboration with Rufus Wainwright, Phantom. When we walked out, it put me into such an art induced daze that I almost bumped and knocked over a sculpture. At that moment I thought that sculpture could not compete with the transformative quality of video installation. That piece, Phantom was a compelling 3D installation.

© Douglas Gordon, Phantom, 2011, stage, screen, a black Steinway piano, a burned Steinway piano and monitor, dimensions variable. Installation view of the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Photograph: Sebastian Kriete.

6. You are a Senior Lecturer in Sculpture and Digital Media at Quay School of Art (NZ) since 1995. In these 20 years world has faced huge transformations that affect our daily life on planet earth: computers, Internet, and other ICT… yet probably the goals of education have not changed that much, have they? Tell us a bit about your experience…

The goals of education remain the same- basically to “assist the flower to grow, in its own way” as Noam Chomsky states, but with the addition of new technology. I am leaving teaching next year when our BFA finishes next year. New Zealand’s new prevailing neo liberal ideology had turned education into the Wild West with “market reforms”. Soon after I arrived in 1995 our school was considered one of the best in the country. It was the 5th BFA degree.

© Brit Bunkley, ‘Expand the Floor of the Cage’, digital print and wood frame, Sarjeant Gallery installation, 1998

Ten years later NZ, a country of 4.5 million people, had 21 art degrees of varying names, lengths and quality (e.g. a 3 year BVA, a 4 year BFA). We could probably only sustain less than half that number. The Times Higher Education World University rankings for universities in some cases have seen our universities ratings fallen through the floor. Our formerly free tertiary education is costing more and more for less and less. And indications are that Education here is heading the way of Australia, the USA and the UK by cutting most subsidies and turning the middle class into indentured servants for life with crippling debt.

7. Any exhibition you have seen that got your attention in the past?

Many, but most recently the Sydney Biennale was magnificent this year with standouts such as the aforementioned Douglas Gordon, Norman Leto, and Ann Lislegaard . Kate Copper’s videos at the KW Institute in Berlin were outstanding, as was a recent new technology exhibition at the Akademie der Künste.

© Brit Bunkley, ‘Hear my Train a’ Comin’ (Bricked-in train), 2012

8. Any artist that you find vibrant and interesting in this moment…

There are so many. Those mentioned above. Siah Armajani. Angelica Mesiti. Andrea Gardner.

9. Plans for the future?

I plan to continue scanning and animating abject monuments.

10. Books that you would not want ever off the shelf?

The ones on my tablet now… Dirty Politics by Nicky Hager, Power Systems by Noam Chomsky, The Nightmare of Reason by Ernest Pawel, A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren and Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

© Brit Bunkley

BY STEVE BISSON

We are happy to introduce the work of Jackie Nickerson from the vast descriptions that we find on her website. Below are presented the two series set in Africa: ‘Terrain’ and ‘Farm’. The series ‘Farm’ is an approach somewhat ‘novice’ to reality, following its description. ‘Terrain’ becomes more plastic and aware, and the author with a sculptural look blends together different organic substances, human and environment, creating a more personal imagery.

TERRAIN
'Moving between land and subject' Sean O’Toole is a journalist and writer living in Cape Town South Africa

Terrain, Jackie Nickerson’s third book of photographs, opens with a portrait of a trim man standing against a neutral backdrop refusing our gaze. Before I try to respond to his refusal, which is obvious, challenging, and enigmatic – a detour. It is an established practice in written encounters with photography to begin with specifics, to translate what is visible and describable into words, and by so doing affirm through language what is verifiable and knowable about this world. It is a productive strategy, one that I want to dispense with temporarily in favour of thinking more broadly and contextually about Nickerson’s photographs.

© Jackie Nickerson, David 2012

Terrain is a book of portrait and landscape photographs descriptive of the materiality of labour on a variety of Southern and East African farms. The latest instalment in Nickerson’s long-term enquiry into farm labour, Terrain is neither an impartial nor all-encompassing document of working life in sub-Saharan Africa’s largest employment sector, even if the photographs are underpinned by Nickerson’s acute awareness of these environments as politicised spaces. Hers is a less tightly bounded project, one in which the dominant tactics are play, obliquity and quiet refusal. More purposefully, Terrain is a book that roams, geographically, but also imaginatively. In affirming what this book is, I don’t mean to deny what is obvious and inescapable. Agriculture is an unavoidable fact of African life: it accounts for 70% of employment on the continent, and 25% of its GDP. While descriptive of modern agribusiness, Terrain essays its subject in a visual language that responds to the material circumstances of its subject. It refuses to merely illustrate statistics. It also rejects the orthodox grammars of explication and moral indignation that are the dominant mode of photojournalism, instead relying on a reduced and unstable artistic grammar to flag what Nickerson regards as important debates around crop specialisation, subsistence farming and food security in sub-Saharan Africa.

© Jackie Nickerson, Propagation Shed, 2013

Formally, Terrain presents a synthesis of two ways of seeing and describing the daily grind of commercial farming. The book juxtaposes portrait studies of farm workers, many pictured at the site of their labour, either harvesting or gathering industrial crops such as tobacco, maize or banana, alongside descriptive landscape studies, typically of open fields and enclosed sites of cultivation. The sequencing of these photographs is however more important than the genre they belong to: Terrain makes no distinction between ethnicity and geography; it erases very real linguistic, cultural, economic and political differences. It is a risky strategy. Although sometimes overstated for effect, there is a common-held perception in the global north of Africa as a vast undifferentiated space. Nickerson, who is nominally an outsider on the continent, is well aware of this bias. She accepts as given that the circumstances of a Malawian farmworker, for example, differ substantially from workers in Kenya, South Africa, Zambia or Zimbabwe, all countries pictured in Terrain. Nickerson has observed these differences first-hand – principally on month-long excursions to specific farms for this project, although it bears noting that Nickerson lived on a farm in Zimbabwe for five years in the late 1990s, an experience that sharpened her understanding of the daily nuances and political complexities of farm labour. But Terrain is not an evidentiary record of what distinguishes here from there, him from her, this from that. Extending on the remit of her debut book, Farm (2002), a series of mostly frontal portraits of farm labourers made in Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe that included tightly-framed images showing the improvised protective aprons worn by farmworkers, Terrain offers a statement about the shared specificities and common habits that typify working life on farms across Southern and East Africa. In particular, it focuses on the unexpected collocation of materials on the intensely worked farm environments she visited. Delicate filigrees of shade netting or plastic sheeting typically obscure Nickerson’s farm landscapes. If these are highly political spaces, as the uneven successes of Zimbabwe’s agrarian reforms and centenary of the disastrous South African Natives Land Act of 1913 forcefully remind, these farm environments are nonetheless also aesthetic locales.

© Jackie Nickerson, Arthur #2, 2012

Although portrayed with a frank and unsentimental eye, Nickerson is capable of intuiting an uncommon stillness in the landscapes she records. The African landscape, long the subject of romantic and ideological projection by travelling western photographers, is shown to possess a simple dignity: it is neither abundant nor bare, merely a ripe context for human activity. It is however Nickerson’s portraits that decisively announce a conceptual shift in her way of looking. The cool objectivity of her previous portraiture, which shares formal and geographic affinities with the colour documentary of Zwelethu Mthethwa and Pieter Hugo, has given way here to an idiosyncratic and highly expressive approach. Drawing on scenes noted in passing, Nickerson collaborated with a range of farmworkers to stage a series of portraits in which their identities are obscured by the materials of their labour: a load of dried tobacco or tangle of wire, a handful of banana leaves or tower of plastic crates. Unavoidably, Nickerson’s portraits recall Jean-François Millet’s respectful observations of bent peasant women bearing fagots of wood, also the material richness described in the street portraiture of Eugène Atget (in particular his 1901 study of a Parisian lamp vendor) and August Sander (one thinks of his 1928 frontal portrait of a young man bearing a load of bricks on his shoulders). Irving Penn’s formal studies of working class Parisians, Londoners and New Yorkers, produced in 1950-51 for Vogue, are also a key reference point, in particular those where – like in Atget and Sander – the material accoutrements of a profession are synthesised into the identity of the subject.

© Jackie Nickerson, Ruth 2012

For Nickerson, the hybrid forms that emerge in her portraiture are illustrative of what she views as the profound material relationship between farmworkers and their environments. Compositionally, Nickerson’s portraits demonstrate a keen interest in the everyday material qualities of farm labour. Plastic objects recur throughout her photographs, notably plastic sheeting, crates and bowls. The sheeting is especially adaptable: it can serve as a translucent barrier wall, be worn as protective dress, or used to fashion an abstract totem. Drawing on routine gestures and transformations of subjectivity that she noticed in passing, Nickerson invited her subject-collaborators to pause and be photographed during these moments where form and subjectivity awkwardly coexist. Some of her portraits recall Albrecht Dürer’s serial studies of drapery, while others seem to share a kinship with William Kentridge’s processional shadow figures, notably his famous icon of a workingwoman bearing a brazier.
While highly theatrical in outcome, Nickerson eschews speaking of her portraits in such determined and expressive terms. “For me, hard labour is a mixture of violence interspersed with very peaceful breaks, where, in this quiet moment, the power and energy of the exercise becomes apparent in the physicality and physiognomy of the person working,” she says. Her comment recalls a statement in a letter by Jean-François Millet, who, like Nickerson, was an interested spectator of farm labour, able to recognise in the stances and postures of farmworkers something beyond mere fact. In a letter written shortly after he moved from Paris to Barbizon in 1849, Millet records: “In cultivated land sometimes as in places where the ground is barren you see figures digging and hoeing. From time to time, one raises himself and straightens his back, as they call it, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand … Is this the gay and playful kind of work that some people would have us believe? Nevertheless, for me it is true humanity and great poetry.”

© Jackie Nickerson, Gift, 2013

Much like Millet, Nickerson knows that there is nothing romantic about farm life. And like John Berger, who in A Seventh Man (1975) noted the idle metropolitan projection of fecundity and plenitude (“the wealth of a cornucopia”) onto farm landscapes, she knows that farming is constant toil, hardship and difficulty, a kind of “violence,” as she puts it. Violence – it is not a frivolous word. “Today’s rural life has been devastated by years of free trade and anti-peasant policies imposed on our governments by their bilateral and multilateral allies,” writes Diamantino Nhampossa, a senior member of Mozambique’s national peasant union União Nacional de Camponeses (UNAC). “The forced privatisation of food crop marketing boards – which, though flawed, once guaranteed African farmers minimum prices and held food reserves for emergencies – and the closure of rural development banks, which gave farmers credit to produce food, have left farmers without financing to grow food or buyers for their produce.” The material impoverishment of Nickerson’s subjects has a historical context: this is it.

But Terrain is not about recording material poverty. The radical juxtapositions that define the sequencing of this book extend to the very subject matter of the portraits. Terrain describes the material plenitude of farming and farm labour in all its contradictions: from the modern cultivation techniques employed using various plastics, through to its codes of dress and entrenched patterns of deprivation (none of the labourers pictured in this book wear gloves, and only a few possess uniforms). “I try to illustrate the embodiment of a metrical cycle, an ongoing cycle where the subject is a fulcrum in this massive cycle from farm to table,” elaborates Nickerson. “Perhaps the visual language – the poses – seem incongruous with the difficulty of the work but I’m trying to ask a question about values and trying to create a visual that will do that.” So, after a detour, we arrive back at the man wearing an olive green button-shirt and soiled khaki workpants. He is pictured standing against a white wall. There is no diverting context, just this man. He faces his interlocutor – the photographer – directly. His pose is however ambiguous: he holds up an intervening prop, a well-used red plastic crate. The man is refusing the photographer – and by implication the photographer’s interested and questioning ally, us. This refusal is mirrored in a similar portrait at the close of Terrain. Refusal is an inflexible word; implicit in the man’s pose, as well as Nickerson’s decision to place his photograph upfront, is a concession: see me, but on my terms.

© Jackie Nickerson, Sililo, 2013

All portraiture represents a negotiation of some sort. These negotiations are fundamentally unknowable, although a photograph can offer varied traces of the underlying negotiation, whether camera angle, comportment of the subject, or use of textual addendum. But fundamentally, the encounter between photographer and subject is unknowable. I mention this is because of the habit to either elide or exaggerate the political dynamics of this unknowable encounter, to either ignore or overstate the dynamic role of human agency. The photographic image is open to multiple abuses: everyone knows this, from dictators and frustrated lovers to fishermen and truck drivers.
In Kayes, a busy trucking port midway between Dakar and the Malian capital of Bamako, I spent a week chatting to truckers, some who agreed to be photographed, as many who didn’t want to yield to my colleague’s camera. “Why?” they routinely asked. I have heard this simple, irreducible question asked countless times: at a Senegalese fishing port, in a Malawian TB hospital, late at night in an obscuring mist at a truck stop on the Swaziland-South Africa border. “For whose pleasure?” This is what I hear echoed in the pose of the man in a green shirt and work-soiled pants. Of course, while the pose belongs to this unknown man, Nickerson retains the power of nomination. In conversations, she regularly returns to this subject: the fundamental power imbalance between photographer and subject. There is no antiserum for it. Photographers take and possess, as much as they describe and make. Inaction is not an option. Nickerson prefers to tackle this impasse head-on, through practice, photography offering an eloquent tool for producing an ethical discourse on labour and power. 

FARM
Words and photos: Courtesy of Jackie Nickerson

"Making this series of photographs wasn’t planned beforehand but is the direct result of my own personal experience. In 1996 went to Zimbabwe to stay with a friend whose family had a farm near Harare. I loved the country but felt constrained by the nature of the social life there, which meant that I wasn’t meeting any indigenous Zimbabweans socially and I began to feel claustrophobic. It was obviously a hang over from their colonial tradition. I started to walk around the farm where I was staying to meet people. Then I bought a small flatbed truck and started to drive all over Zimbabwe, and later on to South Africa, Malawi and Mozambique.

© Jackie Nickerson, Schoolboy, 1998

After a few months, I started to take pictures and decided to concentrate on rural areas and people working in their agricultural environment. I realized that I needed to create a visual language that put across the farmers and farm workers I was meeting as individuals and as modern people. Because that’s who they are. But the images of Africa that I grew up with in the media were wholly negative. And that didn’t fit my own experience of whom I was meeting. I wanted the viewer to be challenged to look at African culture in a different way and also underline the aesthetic. And a way of doing this was to focus on what they had created for themselves to wear which was not only very practical but also beautiful and unique. They are completely original. They would recycle everything that is recyclable from the farm and nothing was wasted. This includes packing material, food containers, sacking, and grain bags – anything that serves the purpose of protecting them on the job. Most of the protective clothing in the pictures is hand made by the people who are wearing them. This makes everything they wear original and work specific and they do have an originality and beauty.

© Jackie Nickerson, Erina, 2000

Africa is so often stereotyped in such a negative way and that just wasn’t my experience at all. One woman in Mozambique said, “Please don’t take our picture because you’re just going to show the world that we’re poor and we don’t feel like that”. The poverty they live in seems relentless, as does the work they do everyday. But they have a tremendous resilience. Most people I photographed had a very strong sense of who they are and this gives them a personal presence and confidence.

© Jackie Nickerson, Netsai, 2000

When you’re walking around the farms it isn’t immediately apparent that there’s anything special about how people look and what they’re wearing because you’re walking on the roads and most people you meet are just dressed like you or I would dress, like in jeans or a skirt and t-shirt, but once you go into the fields and stop and talk and take some time then you begin to see something. 

© Jackie Nickerson

BY DIETER DEBRUYNE

1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?

My first memories of photography are definitely my family photo book. According tot this exquisite document, my first picture was one of a rose standing grimly in a backyard in Antwerp. I remember my mother telling me as a child: «The best moments in life will not be captured in a picture, so try to remember those moments». The real passion for photography grew when I was studying advertising. I never cared much about school and I had no clue where my education was heading. My teacher of ‘digital photography’ gave us the assignment to make a series about ‘depth, repetition, contrast, diagonals…’ At that point in time my world suddenly changed. As I continued my studies, I started documenting everything.

2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?

When I started my dissertation on visual arts at Sint lucas, I did a ton of research and found a lot of inspiring work from the 20’s and 30’s. Back then photography was a ‘new canvas’ for people to capture parts of reality. For some reason, the loss of faith in humanity (during the interbellum) and the search for new horizons are very inspiring to me.

3. Tell us about your educational path. What are the best memories of your studies? What was your relationship with photography at that time?

I started my studies as a ‘land surveyor’. A friend of mine convinced me to try Sint Lucas… and that’s sort of how I rolled into photography.
I loved the creative aspect of ‘advertising’. Basically it means coming up with new and better solutions for problems. I still use this knowledge every day… After I finished my studies in ‘advertising’ with a photographic dissertation I did one extra year of photography. It felt liberating to focus only on photography, and to see other passionate people dealing with the medium.

4. What were the courses that you were passionate about and which have remained meaningful for you?

One of the courses we got was a class ‘Drawing on location’ and ‘drawing nude models.’ I loved how drawing helps you focus, and also forces you to make a lot of aesthetical choices. Because of my lack of drawing skills, I was one of the worst illustrators of my class, but I loved it nevertheless. I remember one of the most inspiring teachers (Andreas Vanpoucke) telling us one spring: «these two weeks, are the only weeks in the entire year when the leafs on the plants and trees display this many shades of green». It’s mostly these type of small things that I will never forget. And every spring when the green colours explode again, there is a huge smile on my face.

© Andreas Vanpoucke, Saint Remy

5. Any professor or teacher that has allowed you to better understand your work?

During my dissertation I started doing research into how reality can be ‘captured’ by photography, this research led me to understand how the eye works, but also how images are formed in our brains. Since my approach was rather technical, I searched for teachers who followed this train of thought. This is how I ended up meeting with Werner Van Dermeersch. He is actually an architect and gave me a lot of support, feedback and helped me to understand a lot of the technical aspects of photography as well as how vision works.

6. What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking?

I think the digital era in photography really is an epic time, it enables you to experiment so much more. I currently use both digital and analogue techniques for certain projects as long as it fits the concept. As a full time photo- and videographer I get a lot of work and customers through Social media.

7. About your work now. How would you describe your personal research in general?

For my dissertation at Sint Lucas, I started a research project on how photography is a reflection of reality. I first researched what people are using photography for and how they portrait themselves. Eventually I found a strange ‘off beat’ way to contemplate my own visual language. 

I felt the need to alter camera - lenses. As photography these days is a ‘package of marketing’ you buy. The way digital images are created is a well-programmed and well -designed way of making people colour in between the lines.

© Jasper Léonard. Digital dslr picture using an attached mirror lens

I started off with making lens attachments for cameras and lenses. It started with a piece of mirror that I mounted in front of my lens. This is how I created images in one location, with parts of the visual field mixed in one photograph.. This was only a starting point, in total I created around eight working attachments or lenses for cameras. One of them was just a big spoon, which reflects a ‘fish eye’ image of the photographer and camera. This lens is basically a “selfie machine”.

8. Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?

The last years I kept altering lenses in my personal work. I use digital DSLR’s for commercial projects and some personal projects, although I feel the need to de-associate myself from post production. For me the creation of an image is something that has to happen in the moment, not the next day in Photoshop. I try to keep my work ‘in camera’. This forces me to make all the decisions on location.
Although I was schooled in digital photography I became fascinated with analogue camera techniques. What started of as a fascination for old camera techniques ended up leading me to a whole new body of work.
From 2011 on, I started doing research into ‘multiple exposures’. This project, I have to admit, got out of hand. At first, I used 120 film camera’s like a ’Zeiss Ikon nettar’ from the 20’s. Eventually I found my way to a medium format Bronica with better lens quality. In search of a wide angle lens, I stumbled upon a ‘view camera‘ (cambo) which I use for my latest work; an analogue large format series.
The reason why I work with this huge camera from the 50’s is just a logical consequence of my work. I can use many different film holders, resulting in combinations of light from different places and time. I started making sketches for most of my pictures and I am constantly on the hunt for inspiring places and the right light conditions. Old habits die hard so I even started attaching different lenses to this camera, creating circular compositions in some of my works.

© Jasper Léonard. Kodak portra iso 160. Triple exposed with a rotation of the negative. Using a medium format lens. Berlin 2014

9. Tell us about your latest project

My latest series is called ‘Fractal horizons’. It consists of a multiple exposure landscape series which could be called psychedelic. It is my first analogue series and first large format project. In the exhibition I exposed small light boxes containing the original ‘dia positives’ of some of my works. With a size from 12 to 10cm they appear as bright beacons of light.

© Jasper Léonard. Expo view of 4 light boxes with original dia positives

I hoped people would find out for themselves that the series was created without photoshop or post processing, unfortunately my work often appears too abstract to be seen as ‘analogue’.

© Jasper Léonard. Expo view fractal horizons

In this ‘digital post processing era’ my work appears to be out dated as people take my work for “digital photo manipulations”. Nevertheless I do feel this is the perfect time for work to question where photography is heading as opposed to where it comes from.

© Jasper Léonard. Four times exposed view on a chemical plant. Kodak portra iso 400. Bronica etr

As I do a lot of ‘time lapse video work’, part of my inspiration comes from time and the way light changes during transitions in time.

© Jasper Léonard. Three times exposed negative shifting the back of the camera. Fuji 100F Cambo + Schneider 90mm

Using these old camera techniques allows me to slow down and take an entire evening (or even more.) for just one image. This evolution in my work is still evolving and I’m quite excited to see where it’s headed.

10. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, that influenced you in some way?

Although my personal work is rather off beat, I follow a lot of expo’s and exhibitions on both photography and arts in general. I have a lot of respect for artists like ‘Jef Beirinckx’ who can make reality look like a playground.
I love the way ‘ Richard Mosse’ uses his infrared film to make people think about ‘the congo’ and the impact of this conflict on human lives. At Breda Photo this year I loved the work (and book) of ‘Alexander Gronsky’ about the borders of cities. As well as Andrej Glusgold’s landscape series with the reference to the romantic painter ‘Caspar David Friedrich’.

11. Three books of photography that you recommend?

“Pastoral / Moscow suburbs” by Alexander Gronsky
“Belgicum” by Stephan Vanfleteren, a classic
“Pierdom “ by Simon Roberts

12. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?

Sure lot’s of them, Richard Mosse was my latest favourite.

13. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?

As my large format project slowly crawls further on a steady but slow pace there might be another expo in 2015 related to it . I’m currently fusing multiple locations with different techniques.

© Jasper Léonard. Fuji 100F with cambo. Fusing the ocean in France and the mountains in spain

I’m also thinking about an expo about the ‘theaterplein’ in Antwerp, I find myself bound to return to this plaza many times a year, and I created a diverse body of work relating to it. 

© Jasper Léoanard. uji provia 100F Double exposed turning the negative

I am also working on a photo book, with an analogue series that I created in the US. If the book finds it’s way to a publisher that is. This series is part of a research project created on a road trip in America. 

© Jasper Léonard. Zeiss ikon nettar with Kodak portra iso 400. Double exposed view in central park 2013

In 2016 there will be an exhibition featuring some of my works I produced in the context of ‘stadsfotograaf antwerpen’ (City photographers of Antwerp.)

© Jasper Léonard | urbanautica

BY TIAGO DIAS DOS SANTOS

1. Tell us about your approach to photography. Where did it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?

It all started the day a friend invited me to his makeshift darkroom in his parentʼs house toilet, around the year 2000. For the first time I understood what a negative was and what developing film really meant. Before that it was just a magic trick available only to commercial photo lab operators. Needless to say, I fell immediately in love with the process. I knew nothing about photography until that point. I had shot no more that a dozen of colour films until then, mostly during school trips. Developing the neg, making the print… that was something new. I never stopped shooting, developing and printing my own photographs ever since. A consciousness about what Photography is, or what is beyond the tangible materiality of photographs, that only came many many years after. I guess many of us started like this.

© Pedro Guimarães from the series ‘Selected Individual Works 2009’

2. Where did you study, and what are your best memories of your that time? What was your relationship with Photography back then?

Well… Iʼve been educated most of my life to become sort of an engineer and take part in my familyʼs business. That almost worked out until the moment I started having second thoughts about spending the rest of my life sitting at a desk. So I kind of envisioned myself pursuing a career as a photojournalist, which led me to drop college just before graduating. I was already getting a few freelance jobs by then, collaborating with a few newspapers. It was a very important period without which I would never had the chance to develop a distance to photojournalism.

Mainly because I realised the way the industry works is by repeating the same trivialities over and over and then call it ʻrealityʼ. I got interested with this kind of problematics so I decided to go back to school and try something different, academically speaking there is. But since higher education in Photography didnʼt quite exist in my home country of Portugal, I decided to move to London to attend MA Photographic Studies at the University of Westminster in London. This was between 2009 and 2010.

© Pedro Guimarães from the series ‘Monsanto Blues’

3. What were the courses that you were passionate about and which have remained meaningful for you?

To be honest I donʼt keep that many memories of time spent on campus. The whole London experience totally overshadowed the academic part. The people I met, the exhibitions I saw, the books I came across. I was reading a lot at the time. Mostly during my endless tube commutes. By the end, somehow, I managed to get myself a basic post-modern thinkerʼs ʻtoolkitʼ, all thanks to Londonʼs chaotic and endless underground network. But I wouldnʼt be totally honest if I omitted this module called ʻThe Text and the Bodyʼ where Iʼve been sort of encouraged to have engage in book making. My debut was to produce this huge A1 booklet with a selection of sentences taken from Jorge Luis Borgesʼ text “The Waiting” illustrated with my own photographs. This really triggered a desire to do more in terms of publishing.

© Pedro Guimarães from the series ‘How to Fly’

4. Was there any professor or teacher that has allowed you to better understand and improve your work?

If I really have to pick a name then it would be David Bate, course leader of the MA. I like the way he writes, the sheer simplicity of his speech. Heʼs a fantastic writer also, with a number of successfully published books, addressing several topics within the fields of Art, Visual Culture and Philosophical Theory. Itʼs difficult for me to define how David Bate has influenced me… it was a very modest contribution but with a visible impact, I must say, not only on me but on all my colleagues. He has fundamentally helped me organise the matrix that constitutes my ʻphilosophical selfʼ, and that was very important, I think… He basically introduced me to the names and the key texts he thought I should know about and ʻinvitedʼ me to work on my own and make everything make sense. It was as if all the concepts and drives that already existed inside of me suddenly started to get names and faces. Some order has been brought to the house, I think, and for that I should thank Dr. David Bate.

5. What do you think about teaching methodology in the era of digital and social networking?

I think social networking affects teaching as much as it affects all other aspects of life. Itʼs everywhere and itʼs here to stay. Schools and Universities have no option but to incorporate this trend into their communication strategies, at all levels. Personally I just get a little confused when sometimes the medium becomes more important than the message. Thatʼs why somehow I think art students instead of simply embracing the phenomenon should work more on disassembling it, turning it upside down, inside out. No one really knows whatʼs going on, right? There is still a lot of experimentation to be done in the digital realm. But if you ask me, it is not my favourite kind of problematic. I am much more old school, I prefer to ignore the internet and dig into the art and crafts of doing. With my hands and my eyes I try to embrace a closer distance relationship with the material world. I believe that true knowledge comes from interaction with the material world.

© Pedro Guimarães from the series ‘Paraisópolis’

6. About your work now: how would you describe your personal research in general? How did it evolve from your early days working with Photography?

In the early days my research was solely about watching other photographersʼ work. It was largely a period of imitation, I must say. I first got hooked on Henry Cartier Bressonʼs work, whose style I tried to emulate for some years. But then, I quickly shifted my attention this group of American photographers who became prominent around the 70s, just before I was born. The big obvious names really like Stephen Shore, Mitch Epstein, Edward Burtinsky, Joel Sternfeld or Richard Misrach, to name a few. All I knew about all these photographers were the photographs I could find in large distribution books, magazines and on the internet. I spent years and years imagining how would be the lives of these artists, just by looking at those photographs over and over again. Because of my admiration for American photography, I slowly abandoned small cameras and started using medium and large format equipment. Taking photographs became more of a process of observation rather than intuition and anticipation.

© Pedro Guimarães from the series ‘Seseña Nuevo’

And then came Art School and, again, some major changes took place… Because all of a sudden I was being confronted with the reality of Londonʼs tough and competitive Art Scene I realised that in order to start a career I would have to find my own voice among the crowd and… work more than ever! But then as I was getting ready to start conquering the world a new family came into the equation. This is still having a profound impact in my life as Iʼm still learning how to deal with fatherhood. Itʼs a very long and complex process of negotiation.

7. Do you have any preferences regarding cameras and formats?

The Hasselblad 500 and the Linhof Master Technika are my favourite tools right now. I also use a small digital pocket camera with an old Leica lens attached for commercial assignments. It a huge crop but I like it. But I do like all sorts of cameras and formats. I think glass is more important than the camera.

© Pedro Guimarães from the series ‘Selected Individual Works 2009’

8. ʻValleyʼ started of as a smaller project that evolved onto something more complex. Can you talk about the process of exploration of that area? What were your main concerns?

ʻValleyʼ didnʼt exactly start as a project… it was something that simply happened long after it had been shot. The starting point was a long term commissioned job where I was invited to document the vast collection of Pre-Historic heritage in Northern Portugal using a lighting technique I was developing at the time. Besides the portable studio I always had an extra 6x7 camera with b&w film with me all the times, so I started taking a few more intimate shots besides the technical digital colour work I was shooting for my client. During that period I literally lived in the woods inside an old Land Rover for more than one year and this, somehow, turned into a powerful mystical experience. The permanent presence of this very particular Pre-Historic iconography had a lot to do with it as well. Over time I started relating to the engravings I was documenting, and during these periods I worked on a personal side a project that I later called ʻValleyʼ. When I looked at my scanned negs years after I had shot them, I realised what I was looking at was the beginning of photography or, at least, the drive for human beings to permanently fix images on surfaces.

© Pedro Guimarães from the series ‘Valley’

9. Tell us about ʻBluetownʼ

ʻBluetownʼ is the real name of a place Iʼve been to in county of Kent, South East England. Itʼs just a small suburb of industrial town of Sheerness, located at the point where River Medway meets the Thames. I stopped there for a few hours. I had a meal at a local pub followed by a cheesy slow dance with a friend around my dinning table. There was this nice music in the air and the wooden walls were covered in fabric. It was way too damp and everyone at the pub was starring at us, it was such a Lynchian scene. When I drove back to London that same night I realised that experience would be the perfect metaphor for my own English experience. The name Bluetown couldnʼt suit better what I was experiencing at the time. But that was not enough, so I decided to set out to find my own ʻBluetown’.

© Pedro Guimarães from the series ‘Bluetown’

What followed next required some experimentation and randomness. For reasons I still cannot explain, I started by superimposing the face of the Queen Elizabethʼs face on Londonʼs map. I then laid one hundred spots along the outline, as in a “connect the dots” childrenʼs game, and drove all the way to each of the connecting dots with the help of a GPS. On each location I exposed a single 4x5 plate. In the end I made a self-published book, almost a kind of newspaper, featuring a selection of plates. I also produced a series of large and medium scale prints that Iʼve exhibited at Ambika P3 gallery as part of my MA graduation group show. I thought this was the best way to tell the English what I thought of them. Some liked, some hated it. There was this man thaw was really upset with what my photographs were trying to tell.

10. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, that influenced you in some way?

Edward Hopper with his good paintings and David Lynch with his bad paintings (and astonishing movies.)

11. Three books of photography that you recommend?

Even if not technically a photography book, I would like to refer a recent addition to my bookshelf called ʻAircraftʼ, by Le Corbusier, published in 1935. I would then other great books that just came to mind: Trine Søndergaars and Nicoli Howaltʼs ʻHow to Huntʼ and Daisuke Yokotaʼs ʻLingerʼ.

© Still of 'Bluetown' selfpublished by Pedro Guimarães in september 2010 in a limited edition of 500 high-quality newspapers, manually signed and numbered by the artist.

12. Is there any show youʼve seen recently that you find inspiring?

Last time Iʼve been to a show that really touched my heart was Jim Goldbergʼs ʻOpen Seeʼ back in 2009 at the Photographers Gallery in London. It was a long time ago, I know. I havenʼt been much to shows lately. Iʼm digging into photo books right now.

13. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future.

Right now Iʼm working on translating ʻHow to Flyʼ into a book. I expect to spend the next few months wondering how to do this.

© Pedro Guimarães | urbanautica

BY DAVID POLLOCK

1. In many cultures mountains are the home of the Gods, remote and removed from ordinary life. Your photographs suggest that tourists seek the sublime in nature but also expect comfort and control. Please comment.

Searching for the sublime in landscape and how it’s perceived and consumed by people (including me) is an important topic of my photography indeed. But isn’t it what modern tourism is about? You want to spend your vacation in adventurous surroundings, experience beauty and wilderness on the one hand and go up the mountain via cable car and order your portion of fries while enjoying the view on the other hand? For my series ‘Gruss und Kuss die Berge sind Schön’ (‘Greetings and Kisses, the Mountains are Beautiful’, 2006 ) I travelled through Swiss, Austrian and Italian Alps to find out that big religion for the majority of people visiting the mountains is sports, may it be for fun, challenge or compensation of everyday’s life. Having lived in the mountains myself for many years made me think about both sides, tourism industry and expectations of guests visiting – not much room left for Gods, though.

© Bärbel Praun from the series ’Gruss und Kuss die Berge sind Schön’ 

2. I think that the image of a feather on graph paper plays a central role in the series ‘This Must Be The Place’. Please give us your thoughts on the evolution of this group of images.

This series is my most recent, still ongoing work and also my most personal one. It’s a slowly, continuosly growing body of work led by intuition and my emotional state. Since I’ve never lived and worked in one place for more than several months in a row over the past years, I have been asking myself questions about everybody’s need of a home, belonging somewhere and the state of being unsettled in a conventional way at the same time. I guess photography has always been a method of mine to get some structure and order into my thoughts, to express myself and stay focused. The image with the feather might tell a story about that.

© Bärbel Praun from the series ‘This Must Be the Place’

3. ‘This Must Be The Place’ seems to flow like a book . Is this a process that interests you?

Definitely. Although it kind of still feels more than a beginning right now, I imagine the story to be told in a book in the end.

© Bärbel Praun from the series ‘This Must Be the Place’

4. Please tell us about the Landscape of ‘On Pad_D 826’ and why it appealed to you.

In 2012 I went to Namibia visiting a good friend of mine. Right from the start I felt totally amazed and fascinated by its landscape and width, fell in love with the special light, the variety of colours of sand and stones, the shape of mountains and deserts. Travelling by car through the country I found out that one could meet not a single person for the whole day. With a population of only 2,1 million people Namibia is one of the least densely populated countries in the world, it has a huge road network nationwide which primarily consists of natural pads surfaced with sand, gravel or even salt; due to low traffic volumes the majority of roads is not tarred. Dominated by the Namib and Kalahari Desert, theoretically one could think Namibia still has a wild and intact landscape. After a while one starts noticing fences alongside the pad (pad: afrikaans for street), signs, closed gates, which remind you of the fact that the country is divided into private and governamental properties – the landreform is a central political topic since Namibia’s independency in the 90’s. To see this obvious beauty, enormous width and loneliness and to explore these little almost hidden signs of political circumstances in landscape led me to start the series ‘on pad_D 826’. Won’t be the last time I go there.

© Bärbel Praun from the series ‘On Pad_D 826’

5. It seems that you are interested in making a connection between the microscopic and the macroscopic. Can you talk about your thoughts about this aspect of landscape that is found in your work?

Various kinds of materials and substances and their surfaces, haptics and shapes always fascinated me, whether they are natural ones like ice, stone or water or artificial ones like plastic foil or styrofoam. Within my work they often either appear as distant landscapes or close-ups. Small items, which make me curious about how they could feel or even sound like, will be combined with natural landscapes. 

© Bärbel Praun from the series ‘This Must Be the Place’

6.Tell us about your work in progress which is stylistically very different from your previous works.

I guess I needed a change and to find some answers for myself, personally in life and also photographically. The working progress slowly became something different, there seems to be more room for coincidences and experiments within this series. Still looking. And enjoying it.

© Bärbel Praun from the series ‘This Must Be the Place’

…

Bärbel Praun, born (1978) in Landshut, Germany. Studies of Photography and Media at University of Applied Sciences Bielefeld (2000-2006). Lives in Munich and Saas Fee, Swtizerland. 

© Bärbel Praun | urbanautica

BY DIETER DEBRUYNE

1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?

I started photographing in 1999 and I made my first interesting picture in the zoo. This was in 2001 and I returned in 2002 to rephotograph it with a large format camera. What you see is an artificial rock and a staircase. I wanted to make pictures that I had not seen before. I saw the picture as a construction of reality and therefore I photographed artificially nature. The photograph is something in between fiction and reality. I was not interested in the pure documentary style but I used this to create another reality.

2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?

I have been photographing for several years in zoos and amusement parks, producing a first book and exhibition “Through the Looking Glass”. I still follow the same fascination for the transformation a picture can undergo compared to reality. I see my subjects as a quiet scene, a still life or a diorama. There is always a kind of absence in it. The pictures have become more complex and the technique has meanwhile evolved.

© Karin Borghouts, series ‘Through the Looking Glass’, 2002

3. Tell us about your educational path. What are your best memories of your studies? What was your relationship with photography at that time?

I studied painting in Antwerp at the now so-called Karel de Grote Hogeschool. This is more than 30 years ago but I still feel the influence in my photographs. Already at that time I wrote a paper “Photography and painting in interaction” where I discussed various artists who used photography to create their work, such as Degas, Breitner, Khnopff and other artists. I also spent my young years in part-time artschools making paintings and sculptures. I worked for a long time as a graphical designer which was a good way to think about visual communication and to learn to frame things.

© Karin Borghouts, series ‘Rooilijn’, 2003

4. What were the courses that you were passionate about and which have remained meaningful for you?

Art Philosophy. I still love the philosophical approach of images. I am not a storyteller but I like to discover meaningfull layers in photographs telling us something about life and human existence.

5. Any professor or teacher that has allowed you to better understand your work?

I am happy to have had many good visual artists as teacher and mentor. They all were important in a certain period of my life and influenced my way of thinking and working.

© Karin Borghouts, series ‘The Show’, 2005

© Karin Borghouts, series ‘The Show’, 2008

6. What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking?

In looking at pictures on the internet you can get a good first impression of the work. But on the internet everything seems to be only information or entertainment. I often feel overwhelmed by too much information. I love to show my photographs in an exhibition or in a book. Scale and quality of the prints are important and I like to see them in a relationship to the space and to other works. The production of photobooks has been never so big now in this era of the internet. I use e-newsletters and my website to inform people about my activities. It is a cheap and efficient way to do so. I stopped facebook, because it is too time-consuming but it can be important to use it when you are starting as an artist.

© Karin Borghouts, series ‘L’esprit de l’espace’, 2011

7. About your work now. How would you describe your personal research in general?

My work is an investigation into the relationship between photography and reality and the other visual arts. An investigation into what representation may imply. I like to draw things in doubt.

8. Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?

I have been working for several years with a large format analogue camera, a Linhof fieldcamera 4 x 5 inch. Now I am photographing digital. I currently have a Canon 5D mark II. I use fixed lenses 35 mm, 50 mm and a wide angle tilt- and shiftlens. I hope I can upgrade my camera next year.

© Karin Borghouts, series ‘Interludium’, 2012

9. Tell us about your latest project ‘The House’

The house of my childhood burned down and I went in to take pictures. I made an exhibition and a publication “The house”. I photographed my parents’ home which was burned down. The work evokes conflicting feelings, which I experienced after the fire. The interiors looked horrible and yet were so fascinating and beautiful. The prints of burnt interiors and objects –perceived as still lifes – are mat prints on Photo Rag paper. I also made an artist photobook along with designer Rob van Hoesel.

© Karin Borghouts, artist publication “The house”, 2014

10. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, that influenced you in some way?

I like a lot visual artists such as Thomas Demand, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Thomas Struth and Lynne Cohen. Also our Belgian artists Dirk Braeckman en Carl De Keyzer.

11. Three books of photography that you recommend?

'Strassen' of Thomas Struth, one of my first photobooks. 'Our true intent is all for your delight' The John Hinde Butlin's Photographs, originally postcards from the sixties for one of the first amusementparks in Great Britain (introduction by Martin Parr). And of course not to forget, my own new publication 'The house'!

© Karin Borghouts, artist publication “The house”, 2014

12. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?
I recently visited the impressive solo exhibition of Dirk Braeckman at Le Bal in Paris. INSIDE in Palais de Tokyo in Paris, contemporary art exhibition with many very good videos and art installations.

© exhibitionview ‘The house’, Breda (NL), 2014

13. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?
I hope to publish a book with my work from 2003 until 2013 and I want to make an exhibition with my museumseries ‘Interludium’. I hope I can show the exhibition ‘The house’ again and I am also working on a new series of special interiors which will be on view next year.
The artist publication The house is available at The Eriskay Connection.

© Karin Borghouts | urbanautica

BY RENATA SCOVINO

1. In the book ‘Internal Affair’ (Schoeler editions 2014), things do not appear in a realistic manner as they are impregnated of the consequences of a difficult and very particular experience lived by photographer Marcelo Greco. In a conversation with the author I discussed some thoughts that permeate this work. Tell me a little bit about the work, and why it was thought to be a book.

Behind this work there’s a personal story with an emotional intensity that only a sequence of images in a book format could translate. But the book does not speak specifically of a situation. The story was just the inspiration for the work.

2. The first impression I had was of a very beautiful book, but after some thinking I realized that this work is much more about the sublime than the beauty. Unlike harmony, it presents a disagreement, it disorients the ability of thought. The fear, the pain, the infinite, the rambling… Do you agree?

I agree. The question is not beauty, at least this is not my search. Of course the result can be perceived through the concept of beauty, but more by the layers of its representativeness, or the subjectivity placed in it. So the concept of beauty is not in the formal structure of the image itself. This honestly is not my field of investigation.

3. According to Spinoza, the world exists and it affects us from outside to inside. That is, first you get scared, and then you know what scared you. Some people, however, are like the mirrored glass and they only come from within outwards. How do you see yourself?

This response is difficult. We are a universe built through time always in constant transformation. The way the outside world affects us depends largely on our internal universe. I do not think there is a one-way. I often think that the flow is in both directions. The world exists and affects us to react to it, but at the same time, we have an internal world that determines the way we see and respond to stimuli from outside. The “scare” is the consequence of this worlds connection, the internal and the external. 

About my creative process, I’m not interested in building poetic narratives that speak simply of the events themselves, but rather of the internal transformations and mobilizations that such events lead. How do they affect and populate my personal universe.

4. The Alethea Greek word refers to true in the sense of unveiling, in your images, however, everything seems covered by a veil that would, on the contrary, be oblivion or death. What is the sense of seeing everything through a veil?

Another question that provokes, makes you think… I think death is a very important issue in my work. In a way this veil you cite is related to the previous answer. It is my inner world creating layers of meaning to see and relate to the outside world.

This veil defines a break in the compass of reality. It is as if it helped me screaming: «Look beyond the object in front of you! Look at my pain!» This truth is not what is before us, but what is for us.

5. I chose an excerpt from a text by Georges Didi-Huberman about the fog and this paradox of visibility.

«(…) o nevoeiro oferece, numa mesma matéria de descoloração, a distância e a potência, a perda das coisas e a carne das coisas, a sua latência fenomenal. No nevoeiro, é certo, nenhum objeto é visível: a grisalha ocupa todo o campo. Mas a sua matéria visual (a bruma, a sua palidez, a sua diafanidade, a sua humidade) envolve-nos, toca-nos, atravessa-nos, penetra-nos até os ossos, já que respiramos essa matéria de apagamento.» [Georges Didi-Huberman: ‘Grisalha: Poeira e poder do tempo’]

In the fog objects lose their essence, disappear, but their visual matter involves us and delights us. Getting to your work the fog becomes part of things and people?

I think that’s right, very well placed. The mist connects all, it is part of everything. It is the contact between the two worlds, is with it that I invent my own world.

6. Tell me a little of the texts that appear at the end of the book.

« (…) like the taut, smooth skin of a piece of fruit that undergoes a small catastrophe when bitten, draining its juice away».
Clarice Lispector

The phrase by Clarice Lispector speaks of a thin layer, the skin of the fruit, which when broken is overflowing something essential. I think that’s how I see the images of this work. There is a thin layer which is very resistant, that is there, and that has to be broken to allow you to feel everything that’s inside. But that depends on a motion, in this case, of the viewer.

As for the text written by me - and I must say I’m not a good write - it is only one key, an invitation to people to come back several times to the book and to take a look again, trying to understand all the layers that are there. I find it funny when people ask me why there is not in the book a text explaining what is the real intention of the project. I answer that there is a text but it is not made of words… You must know how to read!

«Some tears are good for us, clean our soul purify the heart. Other ones, drops of pain caused by people and situations. Among these there are those that are unavoidable, they teach us about life. Many others we must simply dry out and move on. Internal Affair is one of those intimate moments, to move on and reconcile with life. Facing your inner world and projecting it in your surroundings is a poetic way of life».
Marcelo Greco

© Marcelo Greco | urbanautica Brazil

BY DIETER DEBRUYNE

© Lieven Lefere in collaboration with Charles Verraest, ‘General Assembly’, 2008

1.Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?



I got my first camera from my grandfather who was a local photographer and the owner of a photography shop. Each grandchild got a Nikon reflex camera for their 12th birthday. I remember clearly the day it was given to me. Nowadays it is quite normal to have a mobile phone or an Ipad for young people, but back then it was something really special to have a reflex camera as a present. 
My first shots were not that special. I remember loading my first film and taking my camera to the field next to the banquet hall. I shot a whole film of horses that were shitting.

2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days? 



Considering, I’m actually grateful it didn’t!

3. Tell us about your educational path. What are your best memories of your studies. What was your relationship with photography at that time?



As most students I was more or less searching to find my own language as a photographer and trying to overcome the formal language of the Academy. Although this went quite naturally since I wasn’t much of a talker in those days. My relationship with photography only slowly came out some years after graduating. 

© Lieven Lefere, ‘House 2’ (in collaboration with Charles Verraest), 2010

4. What were the courses that you were passionate about and which have remained meaningful for you?



I remember the theoretical classes about Jean-Paul Sartre and Akira Kurosawa best since these teachers aimed to focus on one aspect of literature or film during the course of a whole semester. By this means you got the chance to learn a lot about a single body of work instead of learning little about a lot. I still carry Sartre’s idea of man as a process of becoming along in my daily life and I think it also matches with my creative development. To speak of Kurasowa; I still hear the dying main character of his movie ‘Ikuru’ singing «Life is brief, fall in love, maidens…»

5. Any professor or teacher that has allowed you to better understand your work?



I do not consider the photographs I made during my studies as a body of work so there wasn’t really something to find regarding a general meaning. But of course there were teachers that helped me better than others to point out my mistakes and direct me to an understanding of the methods that make a series of photographs consistent as a whole. I believe the best teachers were those who kept on saying «You are not there yet and clearly explaining to me why afterwards».

© Lieven Lefere, ‘Bed’, 2011

6. What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking?

I am not directly preoccupied with the social media tools. My favorite mistake

7. About your work now. How would you describe your personal research in general?



Photography is in a way always only a limited, artificial copy of reality, a simulacrum . My images expose this mechanism by being representations of representations of reality, or simulacra squared. Through this evident unmasking of the medium the question of the ‘true image’ is made explicit. It is in the abstracting reconstruction of the reconstruction, in documenting the simulation that I try to find the key to make latent aspects, such as the control apparatus present in all social layers, visible.

© Lieven Lefere, ‘Hollow’, 2014

© Lieven Lefere, ‘Man’, 2012

© Lieve Lefere, ‘Road’, 2012

© Lieven Lefere, ‘Window’, 2012

8. Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?



I usually work with a Sinar technical camera with 4-5’ transparency sheets. This kind of camera helps me to find a focus while handling the technical aspects.
When I need to work faster, I work with a borrowed Canon D5 Mark II camera. Afterwards these images are adapted to a 4/5 format. 

9. Tell us about your latest work

My latest work ‘A more elevated scene (looking West)’ was made for an exhibition about the sea in Ostend on the Belgian coast. This was made in the spirit of the artist residence I did at KIK in the Netherlands, which was entitled ‘I Never Promised You a Horizon’. For this series I approached photography as a viewing machine with an unusual vertical frame. I have long wanted to implement different media in my practice. In the past I made photographs that were representations of scenes that I built in my studio but they were never independent sculptures. They were built to be photographed and the result were meant to end up as photographs in frames on a wall.

The work is based on the tallest apartment building of the Belgian coast constructed on the location of the former city theatre. This typical building of the seventies, standing in the second row of blocks, is facing the sea and the dawn. These kind of towers were mostly built upon an idea of Mies van der Rohe claiming that «all people had the right to see the horizon». Indeed, a very poetic idea but in this case giving the horizon to the inhabitants of the apartments meant taking it away from all people living in it’s shadow. Until the early nineties a panoramic restaurant on the top floor of the apartment block compensated for this loss of horizon partly because it was accessible to all people. After this establishment closed the building lost its public function.

© Lieven Lefere, ‘A More Elevated Scene (Looking West)’, 2014, exhibtion view

© Lieven Lefere, ‘A More Elevated Scene (Looking West)’, 2014, The Promise

I made an architectural proposal in the form of a scale model to reshape the building in a public viewing machine, in an attempt to also give back the horizon as the theatre to the public. The scale model was combined with a table, two stools and three photographs that played with the notion of the horizon and were photographed in the tower. As I did for ‘I Never Promised You a Horizon’ I played with the vertical as opposed to the horizontal character of the seascape by framing only a thin vertical line.

© Lieven Lefere, ‘I Never Promised You a Horizon’, 2014

© Lieven Lefere, ‘I Never Promised You a Horizon’, 2014, exhibition

© Lieven Lefere, ‘I Never Promised You a Horizon’, 2014, inscription

10. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, that influenced you in some way? 


I am certainly influenced by the formal language of the Belgian sculptor Jan De Cock since I was his assistant for a long time. I consider this period as a very important part of my own development as an artist and I very much believe that newly graduated art students can benefit from working some years in the studio of an international artist.

© Lieven Lefere, ‘Integrety Protecting the Work of Man’, 2010

Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of the photographers I admire most for his serial approach of photography and the notion of time, the consistency of his body of work and the simplicity of his aesthetics. I refer to two of his series in my latest work ‘A More Elevated Scene (looking West)’ by combining the theatre with the seacape.

The young Belgian artist Egon Van Herreweghe is inspiring for his research on the relation between the original and the copy.

11. Three books of photography that you recommend?
- ‘Relation’ by Craigie Horsfield 
- ’Architecture of Time’ by Hiroshi Sugimoto 
- The Atlas Group‘1989-2004 A Project by Walid Raad’

12. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?

Some weeks ago in Düsseldorf I found myself shivering again in front of the 'Sterne' series by Thomas Ruff. Intriguing to feel how a black surface with some bright dots can make you fall to the floor.

© Thomas Ruff

13. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?

Currently I am working on a project about the Mausoleum of Ho-Chi-Minh in Hanoi. One of the blind spots in the world where no photographs can be taken. I will make a reconstruction of the inner space of the building by means of the testimonials by a group of Western tourists. Questioning the truth about perception, the ability to remember and the status of an image in relation to what we call reality.

© Lieven Lefere | urbanautica Belgium

A BOOK REVIEW BY PETER WATERSCHOOT

No Fitzcarraldo.
After a first vision I would have expected to meet a somewhat disturbed frenziesh Fitzcarraldo-Kinski like figure, but instead I shook hands with a timid, introverted, (though heavily tattood, in a quick glance) French guy at the Tipi bookshop, Brussels. Cyril Costilhes was there, together with the dandy, modestly charming staff of Akina books, presenting Cyrils oeuvre called ‘Grand Circle Diego’. Flipping through the book you plunge into a thick blackness. Cyril has fought a personal battle; in a few key words; an ambiguous father-son relationship, Madagascar, a delapidated port-town, casino, accident, bad ending. Thus, having a closer look, page by page, you see that the book is a about someone who needs to share a personal trip, fighting demons of the past, fighting demons of the present. Cyril immediately deliberatly pulls you underwater in an oil-cloth basin. Looking for the spirit of his father, there is something boyish about this book as well. Standing at the shore he is the boy who’ s throwing rocks in the nightblack sea. Circles drift away. We are all sons of our fathers. But this is the kind of place where boys become men. There is a certain butterfly effect feeling in this book, although it wouldn’t be a butterfly, it would be a moth. A moth between the agave, the bush, and that one electric lightbulb. He’s watching circles move wider and wider until disappearance. But nevertheless an audacious statement, because these rings on black oily drab will never disappear. And that’s the beauty of a book. They are made for posterity. They are built to last as long as possible. Hence they keep on talking. Over and over again. Very wide rings. Something to consider when making a book. The more existential stress you might be getting on wanting to make one of these of your own; good! Please suffer!

Rings on black water.
Within the system of wider rings of catastrophe, the horror vacuüm, la maladie, l’ennuie tropicale, the author and the editors are constructing a much more refined subsystem of miniatures, wonderment and aesthetics. The author fights the nightly black with a lightsabre. A lonely knight. I see patterns from the artist tattoos on Cyrils arm, returning in his graphical approach when overexposing shacks, trees, woodshed, and thus creating a mizmaze, a well crafted spider’s web. I suggest you let yourself get caught in that web, and buy the book. It is a beautifully bound hardcover object, which sings a pirate’s gospel from page one till the end. I like it when artist live their art. When you can read in every page of a photobook; this, would have been made, even at last breath.

Silence.
You cannot but relate this book to ‘Heart of Darkness’, there where Conrads book was a queste on how to express anxiety unspeakable of, within a limitated frame of literary language, Grand Circle Diego does the same but mute. It continues this tradition, ad verbatim, but mute as mute can be. In Grand Circle Diego, without the sounds of crickets, behind the various visual impulses, there is the absolute, and nothing but torturing, silence of ‘death before life’. 
[Peter Waterschoot, Gent, Belgium, 2014]

…

Info:

Grand Circle Diego
CYRIL COSTILHES

Hardcover quarterbound leatherette
144 pages, 81 color plates
16 x 23 cm
Offset UV printing on Munken Polar Rough
First Edition 800 copies

Publisher AKINA Books

…

© urbanautica Belgium

BY STEVE BISSON

1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?

I grew up in a town close to the sea. As a teenager I started taking photographs there. Often I cycled to the dunes and played with my camera, catching reflections and shadows, looking for new perspectives and compositions. My best friend joined me regularly and then I would use her as a model. Once I photographed her arm in the same direction the sea had flown over the sand. I still like that photograph.

2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days? 

In the beginning I was mainly getting to know the medium esthetically, training my eye and looking for beauty. In later stages these things (esthetics, a good eye, beauty) are still important, but they became natural and self-evident. Nowadays I do not take a photograph in order to take a beautiful photograph. I have other reasons that depend on the project I am working on. The photograph might be beautiful, but that is not my goal - at least not consciously.

3. Tell us about your educational path. What are your best memories of your studies? What was your relationship with photography at that time?

I studied Photography at the Utrecht School of the Arts in the Netherlands. When I was selected I was told that I “might be a bit too much art” for that school. The emphasis was on documentary photography. We were trained to look and think carefully about images and stories and to articulate our reasons for our order, selection and presentation. What if you place this photograph next to that one? What if you take that photo with a large format camera? What if you take this excellent photo out of the series altogether?

I spent these four years experimenting with styles and techniques, having long discussions, baking cakes to accompany the long discussions, deleting the dust from scans and finding my fascinations. There were some periods when I barely saw daylight, due to darkroom and/or slide projector enthusiasm. I wouldn’t have missed these four years for the world.

There might have been some truth in what I was told at the very start, about me being ‘’too much art’’. Or maybe the school was not art enough? What I missed was a connection to other art forms. When I was working on some subject teachers would give me names of other photographers as references to look at. No one would tell me about a sculptor, director or performer who had worked on the very same subject. I think that’s a missed chance. Photography is part of the world of visual arts but is often treated as a little island all on its own.

© Sanne Kabalt, from the series ‘Sympathy/Antipathy/Ignore’

4. What were the courses that you were passionate about and which have remained meaningful for you?

There was a course that was very different from the rest of the curriculum, about presentation. The teacher challenged us to present something other than our actual photographic work. In her very own manner she drove us to beautiful presentations and performances. My father died during my time at the art school. Because this presentation course was so free and strange, it felt safe to do something with this loss in that context. I literally turned a room upside down and projected a video related to my father. I found a long narrow alleyway in town, filled it with photos of my father playing guitar, his songs and sheet music. My classmates were to walk trough the alley alone and pick a song. At the end of the alley I waited and sang it to them. It was very intimate and therapeutic.

5. Any professor or teacher that has allowed you to better understand your work?

Many teachers helped me to understand my work, but the most profound conversation I have had during my studies was not with a teacher. In the beginning of the third year the school pushed us out into the great wide world to meet likeminded photographers. With a handcrafted portfolio under my arm I shyly visited people I greatly admired. One of them was Machiel Botman. He saw who I was as a person and what I made as an artist as one and the same thing. I think this is very rare. A line is often drawn. Nobody ever talks so deeply in the very same sentence about your relationships and your work, your childhood and your work, your sadness and your work. It was an intense experience. I felt like Machiel saw into the very depths of me. If you’ve seen his photobooks, this is hardly surprising.

© Sanne Kabalt. Video installation including two beamers, two screens, sound and electronics. Sound composed by Frank Wolff & Jannick Oeben Video duration 8 minutes (Loop.) Sound continuous. 2013

6. About your work now. How would you describe your personal research in general?

I play with what is seen and what is felt. Though I use photography - a visual medium – my work is about what you cannot see. I research aspects of human psychology such as memory, sanity and empathy. I want to give the invisible a visual form.

I approach each project as a fresh start. For each project anew I make my choices depending on what I want to convey: Color or black and white? Photography or video? A projection, a book, printed images on the wall or something else?

Another aspect that I am always researching is openness, a way to challenge each viewer to see my work in their own way. I believe a work is not finished until the viewer relates to it. I want the viewer, his position in the space and his own associations to become part of the work. 

For example, I am currently working on a project called ‘Recollection’. It is about how you remember some one who is no longer there. It is a challenge to visualize this theme and perhaps even impossible. I photograph a man on 4x5 inch slides. More often than not he is unclear, under- or overexposed, or changed. Though sometimes you can see him clearly. Like in the mind. I have exhibited a first photograph from ‘Recollection’ as a large print on duraclear pasted on glass in a standing steel frame in the space. You can see through it, you can walk around it. You see only a suggestion of a person. Some people are frustrated because they want to see more. Others complete the person in their minds.

7. In ‘Recollection’ you use these words: «I use photography, the medium that is most used to save memories, to visualize how they fade». Do you think that photography today is related to the need to feel present someway? 

I believe we photograph people, places and moments to save them. Long ago we saved precious daguerreotypes of our family, then glossy printed photos pasted in albums and now tons of snapshots in phones, hard drives and clouds. The physical form is different, the quantity is different, yet the power of photography is the same. We have always wanted to keep a good moment close to us long after the moment has passed. We still do.

© Sanne Kabalt, installation view ‘Recollection’

8. Tell us about your project ‘Some Say’ and of your Nes artist residency in Iceland? 

Next to my own work as a photographer I have been working with children and art for the past few years. I build art installations outside with children and see them as real artists with their very own original ideas. I have always treated these two aspects of my practice as two separate things: Photography on the one hand, children’s art programmes on the other hand. Then there came this idea to combine the two into a children’s book with photography.

I went to Iceland for its landscape. There is a residency in the North called Nes where I worked for two months in the company of ten other artists. Nes is situated between the sea and the mountains. Never before or after have I felt so focused. Every day (except for some cases of strong snow, wind or rain) I went out, walked and photographed. I soon saw wolves in the snow, dragons in the rocks, witches in the ice and trolls in the seaweed. They are there, if you know how to look for them. Some Say, the book I made, is a combination of text, black and white photographs and drawings. It is an ode to the landscape and an ode to the imagination.

The first chapter goes like this:

Some say a rock has no feelings
Some say mountains can not move
Some say snow can not see
But I don’t believe them.

The book is unconventional, large and uses different kinds of paper. I am currently working on getting it printed and published. 

© Sanne Kabalt from the series ‘Some Say’

9. I very much like the ‘Dissimilitude’ graduation work. Could you tell a bit about this project?  

When looking at a portrait we instinctively draw conclusions about the person in the photograph. We assume we understand who this person is and what he or she is like. I once showed some portraits I’d made to friends and one of them pointed to one photo and said: «Sometimes I feel like this». It is fascinating to me that we think we see/know these things about the portrayed.
Dissimilitude is a slideshow consisting of 67 black and white portraits of two girls. I combine and compare their faces and emotions. Sometimes they are so different from themselves, as if they are a completely different person. Sometimes they are so similar to another, as if they feel the exact same feeling.
With this work I want to make you think about portrait photography. I know that as a photographer I influence how the portrayed person looks in a thousand small ways. By what I say and how I feel during the taking of the photo, which photos I choose, what I do and do not show, who I show it to, where and how. In Dissimilitude’s final presentation I used slide projectors that make loud noises. I like to think this is a tangible trace of me as the maker, saying: WHAM I present you this image WHAM and how about this one WHAM and the next one…

© Sanne Kabalt

10. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, that influenced you in some way?

During my studies I have done an internship with Anouk Kruithof. She is Dutch, but she was living in Berlin back then and is based in New York today. She is an extremely hard worker with a very strong drive. Seeing Anouk work from day to day with such passion and perseverance and becoming part of this strong workflow for a while influenced me a lot. I can still hear Anouk’s voice in my head sometimes, saying: «Nothing is too hard or too strange or too much work: Do it! Go for it!»

11. Three books of photography or not about photography that you recommend?

Masao Yamamoto - É
This book is large while the photos are small. The effect is magical.
Yamamoto’s own words: «If I take small photos, it’s because I want to make them into the matter of memories. And it’s for this reason that I think the best format is one that is held in the hollow of the hand. If we can hold the photo in our hand, we can hold a memory in our hand».

Christian Boltanski – Kaddish
This monumental book holds thousands of images from divergent sources that together tell a story about Holocaust. Boltanski: «I always say that I am a big liar, but I lie because reality is so complex».

Rainer Maria Rilke – Letters to a young poet
This is not a photography book, but it has been vital for me.
Some words from this book that I often re-read: « an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come».

12. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?

Museum Dr Ghuislain in Ghent is a former mental hospital converted into a museum about psychiatry. I experienced some of my strongest surges of inspiration here. I will bring them another visit later this week to see the current exhibition about melancholia and depression.

13. Projects that you are working on and plans for the future?

• I am looking for a publisher for ‘Some Say’.
• I am investigating the presentation of photos from ‘Some Say’ as silkscreens on glass, together with a glass artist.
• With a curator I am working on a solo exhibition of my work in Amsterdam.
• There are some group exhibitions coming up in de Veluwe (NL), Den Bosch (NL) and Bremen (DE).
• I am struggling to find the best presentation for more ‘Recollection’ works.
• I have been selected for two residencies in 2015: Atelier Austmarka in Norway and Pompgemaal Den Helder in the Netherlands.
• For Vrij Nederland, a Dutch magazine, I will make new work about the expected return of the wolf in the Netherlands.
• I am researching and starting a new project on empathy.

© Sanne Kabalt | urbanautica The Netherlands

BY DIETER DEBRUYNE

1. Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?

I knew I wanted to be a photographer quite early on, and started to study photography when I was 15. I was always the one with the camera since I was a child. In my family I was always surrounded with a film camera, a photo camera and a binoculars. My mother was an amateur photographer and my father a bird watcher. It did something for me, framing the world and looking at this framed world. We had like a thousand of family slides. For hours I could watch them in my room. I loved the sound and the heat of the projector; the light, the dust flying between the projector and the image. But I started all this without knowing what photography was all about. In my first years with a ‘real’ camera, I always made images of one of my best friends. We went to the strangest places, with the strangest outfits. It was just fun. My own first images that really meant something to me where made at the academy in Ghent. It was there that I found out what photography was all about. We were encouraged to throw ourselves into the world and deal with that as a photographer. From then on I could follow up on my curiosity and the unknown.

© Debby Huysmans from the series ‘Late Spring’

2. How did your research evolve with respect to those early days?

In the beginning photography for me was a tool to make some stories visible and to observe. I mostly felt inspired when I could just use the camera to be in the world and to go to other, unknown places. But also walking around, observing and making images in an intuitive way. The first work I made at school that was really meaningful to me emerged when I started to follow a Polish community of seasonal workers, traveling with a Belgian circus. I just stepped into a completely unknown world and for me this had a very big influence in my further projects. I realized that being a photographer was a beautiful thing, I spent a lot of time with these people, we couldn’t speak with each other but the camera became a way of communication while travelling with these people day and night. I felt a very great devotion to this project. It became my first reportage series, black and white, I worked on very hard for several months. A few years later in my graduation year I travelled to Poland, to the village and families of these workers. For this project I really knew what I didn’t want to make, which was a traditional report. So I started to travel with this in mind which created an openess for all the rest that made me experiment with different forms. I wanted to be in the world but I tried to find a way to talk about this in a more subjective way, searching for another aesthetic. Eventually this resulted in my first book ‘Elementarz’. One project leads to another and it’s always about questioning the medium, the image, again, searching for a right form. What works, what doesn’t? How does it communicate? How do things look like in an image? And how do images work together? How to make a photobook? Etc. But I always start from the outer world, from a social involvement, but always searching for a fresh form to tell my story.

3. Tell us about your educational path. What are your best memories of your studies?

What was your relationship with photography at that time? I studied at the Art School, KASK, in Ghent, which was a wonderful time. That’s where I realized what photography was really about. Back then it was all about exploring the medium and trying to understand other photographer’s works.

© Debby Huysmans from the series ‘Late Spring’

4. What were the courses that you were passionate about and which have remained meaningful for you?

During these 4 years there were many different courses that had some influence in my work and were inspiring. Getting to know the oeuvre of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, every friday morning listening to Stefan Hertmans, the philosophy courses, the art history courses… it was all new to me at that time and it had a big impact on me. But of course the whole program helped me to find my personal approach to photography. In the first years I mainly was occupied with learning to understand this new language. Learning to read the work of others. That’s how I started to learn the most, and finally how I learned to tell my own stories. I clearly remember one moment our teacher filled a table with photo books and gave us all the time to look. This was a groundbreaking moment for me and where I began to think a lot about photography as a medium. I also studied as an exchange student in the UK at Bournemouth and Pool College of Art and Design, the school where Wolfgang Tillmans had studied also. They had a big library and because we were very much left on our own I spend a lot of time there looking in books I had never seen before. This school was only 2 hours from London by bus, visiting London at that time made me see different interesting exhibitions. It was an intensive experience. So looking in books and trying to understand other photographer’s work was of a major importance in grasping with this language.

5. Any professor or teacher that has allowed you to better understand your work?

Finally during my graduation year I had a very inspiring mentor Annelies De Mey, We had valuable meetings and she taught me how to handle the photographic form, how to be critical and how to develop an autonomous and personal work. I’m very grateful for this. I first experienced the process of bookmaking and fell in love with it.

6. What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking?

I like the freedom of the digital era in the photographic process as well as the digitizing of information about what is going on nowadays in the world and in contemporary photography. But on the other hand sometimes the overkill of images and information can become discouraging.

© Debby Huysmans from the series ‘Late Spring’

7. About your work now. How would you describe your personal research in general?

I mostly start from an unknown place. Without searching for something specific mostly there is some story, situation, some meeting that crosses my path and inspires me to start something. Then I start to think about how I can deal with this. How to find a fresh photographic language and to find the right form to transform my experience, without repeating myself. I don’t want to work with images that feel too safe to me. Every project is a continuing of my personal research and exploration of the photographic form. Mostly I look for everyday fragments that I can use to question things, depending on the project. I try to elevate this into atmospheric visual poetry, in this way the aesthetics are used to catch the viewer’s attention. For me this is an interesting way to ask the bigger questions in life. An image needs the tension between different layers in order to question and examine its subject. I use my camera to collect a lot of images to take with me to my studio. This is only a part of the process. The next important step in the process is deciding which images I will bring together. It’s all about the challenge of combining images, how does it work to bring certain images together? I like the feeling of disarrangement, but how much of this is needed?

8. Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?

In the analogue period I loved to work with my Pentax 67 but for several years I have been using with my 5D camera and I’m really happy with this way of working. I love the kind of freedom you get with the digital camera.

9. Tell us about your latest project ‘Late Spring’

The idea of this project started in 2010 during my first visit at Art Residency Mustarinda in Finland. A place surrounded by old-growth forests. Different stays at this art residency followed. The first moment when I was in this very old nature was very special to me. It almost had something of a spiritual experience, but most of all I was inspired by so many different stories about this place from the people I met. Each person had his own strategy, his own dream, philosophy or opinion, but all of them were involved and engaged with these mystical surroundings. It was not only a beautiful old rare place. Because of al the meetings it was clear that this was a quite complex place, a place which is constantly changing in relation with human kind. I started to explore this area and for this I started to follow different people who had their own strategy in dealing with this place. Walking, beholding, observing, telling and collecting, are just some of the methods used to clarify the mystery of this ancient woodland. For example there is Riitta, a biologist, who sensitizes people about nature. She takes people into the forest and makes them play specific games she invented to look at nature in another way. For example, One Square Meter, Color Card Game… She also took clowning courses in Italy. Playing the clown enables her to convince people of the forests’ importance in an accessible and playful manner. In this way she brings the story of the forest closer to people. But I also met with researchers who collect different forest liter which they store in a bank, together with samples of the past 100 years. I brought these different meetings and stories together. Showing these different images next to each other was a way to express the complexity of this place. I didn’t want to tell only one story because there simply wasn’t one story to tell. The character of this place was the complexity and the continuously moving dialogue between nature, the spirit and research. On the one hand there is the economical part like the paper industry lead by the government; on the other hand there are activists fighting to protect the natural state of the forest, each in their own way. There was always a clash between these different stories. 

© Debby Huysmans from the series ‘Late Spring’

10. Is there any contemporary artist or photographer, even if young and emerging, that influenced you in some way?

Of course there are too many to mention, but if I would pick a few, a great master to me is Paul Graham. And I also like how Anouk Kruithof handles the medium although she covers a completely different area. But that’s what keeps it interesting; different views and other innovative ways of handling photography. I always keep an eye on new books that are coming out. I often see artists using photography in a quite intelligent way and that makes me happy.

11. Three books of photography that you recommend?

I like the storytelling of Sara Lena Maierhofer in ‘Dear Clark’. I’m very curious of the new book of Paul Graham ‘Does Yellow River Runs Forever’ because I loved the different stories in his previous book A Shimmer of Possibility. And the latest book I bought was the beautiful publication ‘Prolifération’ of Geert Goiris.

12. Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?

Lately I saw different interesting exhibitions at the FotoMuseum in Antwerp, for example the exhibition of Broomberg and Chanarin, The ‘Enclave’ of Richard Mosse and the exhibition of Vincent Delbrouck that is running at the moment. 

© Debby Huysmans from the series ‘Late Spring’

13. Projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?

I’m experimenting with different things all the time. As said before, this is my way of working. It’s a process. So I will be continuing making more books and exploring the language of photography. One of the experiments running now is ‘Shaking Trees’, an exchange project with Riitta, the biologist from ‘Late Spring’. When I said goodbye to her in Finland I knew I wanted to work with her again. From then on she gave me instructions I had to follow up within nature. I see it as a kind of performance I have to do. Sometimes I take different people with me to experience this performance. It’s about the alienation between modern man and nature. In an artificial way I bring them back together with this project. I try to help to realize Riitta’s goal, to sensitize people to their natural environment. I’m trying to make a publication of ‘Elk Island Construction Workers, made in Moscow’. It’s a work that works very well in a book and works completely different than my other books.

© Debby Huysmans | urbanautica Belgium

BY STEVE BISSON

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Something Beautiful, a group show curated by Nicolas Wagner and Khary Simon of CRUSHfanzine. This exhibition uses the lens of contemporary photographic portraiture to examine the ideals of youth as a product of memory and the wisdom of hindsight. Like a daydream, the works on view propose the fleeting sensuality of a fantasy, coupled with the sense of loss that comes from a jolt back to reality—a juxtaposition analogous to the journey from childhood to adulthood. Artists Jeff Burton, Sue de Beer, Keith Edmier, Roe Ethridge, Annika Larsson, Deana Lawson, Viviane Sassen, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Xaviera Simmons, Dorothée Smith, Eva Stenram, Eric Stephany, and Wu Tsang come together here, offering varied photographic visions that portray different manifestations of this shifting space—between youth and maturity, between the ideal and the true.

Something Beautiful takes the recent still and portrait photography work of Sue de Beer as its point of departure. De Beer’s earlier work is recognized for its empathetic portrayals of youth, in which her raw process of casting and on-camera improvisation create a sense of the unfolding of real experience located in an artificial world of sets and props. In her latest work, de Beer cuts notions of reality adrift, giving her subjects idealized versions of themselves: an entire film encapsulated in one image. The selected artists follow varied routes in their embodiment of this theme, presenting photographic visions of memory, experience, beauty, and voyeurism.

© Sue de Beer, Still from The Ghosts, 2011

The rawness of exchange between model and camera provides fertile ground for exploration of the in-between. Artists Vivianne Sassen and Dorothée Smith make portraits whose documentary value is superseded by narrative suggestion and sheer loveliness, evoking the uncanny ability of memory to heighten and shape our histories. The fleeting middle ground between youth and maturity or the illusory and the real is further explored in Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s ability to capture his subjects, human or inanimate, in informal, semi-candid moments that consider a transient stage. Roe Ethridge leads us seamlessly through distant landscapes and familiar faces, providing a sense of nostalgia in his intimate portraits. Together, they promote a quality akin to languishing moments before falling into an afternoon dream, only to awake with splintered memories.

© Dorothée Smith, Untitled, N°004, Hear us marching up slowly series, 2012

Born from a visceral, multi-sensory reaction to dream and memory, we find Eva Stenram’s portraits with isolated body parts and furniture as central within domestic settings. Selected pieces of information are conveyed, leaving the viewer to piece together what has unfolded through a glimpse of a personal environment. Similarly, Deana Lawson imparts her subject’s individual and social backgrounds through personalized settings. Keith Edmier takes it a step further in his sculptural representations referring to personal narrative in his studies of nature, sexuality, and regeneration.

© Eva Stenram, Drape VII, 2012

Eric Stephany and Xaviera Simmons follow similar modes in their exploration of the familiar thwarted by the enigmatic. Stephany’s shadows reveal, or rather conceal, the object of his affection and the ubiquity of sexual desire. This disorienting fragmentation is expanded upon in the work of Annika Larsson and Wu Tsang. Larsson and Tsang disorient the viewer with conflicting visual or narrative fields present in their work, analogous to the tension that exists between recalled and actual experience.

© Wu Tsang, Show’s Over (Part II), 2013

Taken together, the works in this exhibition convey the atmosphere of the past as it is evoked in the present—a bittersweet sentiment at once physical and cerebral. Here, the qualities of youth are portrayed, but can only exist in an incomplete state. The quiet tension of desire, with its accompanying sense of loss or insatiability enables an exploration of the uncanny, wish-fulfilling nature of images, and the performance between photographer and subject allows us, the ordinary viewer, to participate in the production of something beautiful.

Curators Nicolas Wagner and Khary Simon are the chief editors of CRUSHfanzine, a quarterly art and culture publication based on obsession. Produced in New York and Paris, it is sold in MOCA LA, Tate Modern, McNally Jackson, Palais de Tokyo, Printed Matter, among others. In recent issues, CRUSHfanzine has collaborated and featured works by Marilyn Minter, Marina Abramović, Jenny Holzer, Woody Allen, James Franco, Peter Marino, Juergen Teller, Tom Burr, Wade Guyton, Jack Pierson, The Art Production Fund, Lisa Phillips, Elmgreen and Dragset, and Sue de Beer.

© Marianne Boesky Gallery

BY DIETER DEBRUYNE

The host and founding-father of this art-venue, Peter Waterschoot, used to invite fellow artists to his renovated home, where he offered them space on bare walls to show their works. Meanwhile, after several editions, ARTWALL started to boom, the house got too small, ARTWALL went extra-muros and the venue has become a well-known event.

© Sabine Oosterlynck and Steve Reynders

For this edition, Peter invites 9 fellow photographers, to reflect on their oeuvre, showing us 5 significant pieces, so-called ‘Cornerstones’. Thus the matrix for this edition, a point of (no) return. A ricochet.

He wrote the following for Artwall 9:

«Images flash us by at the speed of light. Skim vs. Scan. What a marvelous inspiration this is! Fast forward on hitting the reverse button, for the occasion. Let’s reflect on slowing down a bit. But not too much. Allow ourselves a rear view mirror approach, in order to look ahead».

The question for retrospection was for some photographers a difficult exercise, eg, Tine Guns constantly re-uses images in different contexts. Our (collective) memory and history are a main source of inspiration for her. She works with archives, both, personal and collective. Her images are in constant motion, the only ones that are locked are the ones she made books with. «Photobooks need to be read like a film». So I unlocked a photo from each photobook and made a new sequence/story with it. «My cornerstone is a liquid stone».

© Tine Guns

Stéphanie Yoshiwara found a solution in selecting 5 pictures as blueprint of her favorite hobbies: portraits, erotica, abstraction, identity.

© Stephanie Yoshiwara

She chooses to work with appropriated images. This is a result of a feeling that there are enough images around to start working with.

© Stephanie Yoshiwara

The editing or reworking of material is something Alexander Saenen does too. But his starting point is personal and the used material as well. Still he tries to bring his personal story in a universal language. He erases his own view.  He says: «I try to find very different ways to go about personal images which makes it possible to transform my own material».

© Alexander Saenen

© Dries Segers

Standard formats, standard colors, standard shapes, standard weights… Moments of wonderment on the everyday and an absolute love for materials; wood, foam, celluloid. The pictures of Dries Segers counterbalance the works of Alexander Saenen. However, they both have a rather articulated love for objects, and Dries takes us into a world of standardized materials. The poetic functionalist Jan De Cock isn’t that far off. Dries fell in love with the simplicity of textures. This ‘normalness’, this non logic-beauty. He is tuned into singularities in time which most strictly-logical humans pass by without noticing. Within photography, he has the mentality of a painter. He uses the world in a different manner to make abstractions of shape, color and content, hence ‘constructing’ his images. This photography isn’t just a registration of anecdotes or memories, this photography is becoming a new way of sculpting.

© Dries Segers

“Gefühl ist alles, Name ist nur Schall und Rauch…” (Goethe, Faust)

© Armand Quetsch

The vanity theme is a predominant subject of the ‘ephemera’ series from Armand Quetsch. His photography is in stark contrast with some of the others I already mentioned. Like the quote above, we see eg a portrait of his granduncle, moments after he died. Or a picture from a Nerium oleander (lorier rose), a very beautiful, but toxic, plant.

© Michel Vaerewijck

In this post-Pop era Michel Vaerewijck and Thomas Vandenberghe underline the importance to be ‘sui generis’ in order to bring the ‘objet d’art’ to life. Their 1/1 editions. Reproduction is ultimately limited.
In their diaristic approach everything is ‘nür Gefühl’.
Michel tells me he’s in constant battle with the anecdotic. His work is a tool for discovering life and the quest for the essence of (his) life. Themes like vulnerability and limitation also repeatedly occur in the work of Thomas.

© Thomas Vandenberghe

Peter Waterschoot shows ‘stand alone pieces’, images that aesthetically satisfy and articulate a desire to create their own scenery. The selection that keeps its relevance throughout time. Not so long ago Peter Waterschoot was still a storyteller, but here we see him, for the first time, showing his pictures, in a decontextualized setting. Nevertheless Peter sees each picture once again as a possible route to different territory.

© Peter Waterschoot

Also Daniel Piaggio Strandlund and Nathalie Nijs prefer to see their work presented independent and non-combined. There is no sequential story. Nathalie wants an open ending, sobriety and a balance between touching the ‘essence’ and the ‘image’. The space within the image and within the ‘meaning’ of the image. A stillness she cherishes. «Be like a sponge, absorb everything, then leave it to ripen, inside yourself, literally on your insides, build up this tension, and finally throw it all up.»

«I am already to far from it; the only thing I can say is that in neither case was there anything which ordinarily be called an event» (Jean-Paul Sartre, La nausée)

By bringing these images into the world they’re no longer mine, they transcend the personal story where they originate from, they become part of a bigger story.

© Nathalie Nijs

Instead of working in photo series or photo books, Daniel examines wall photography and projectionas a dimensional object in space. The same thing Nathalie predominantly does. Nathalie shares her images on the internet, but the magic happens when the images ‘go offline’, which they seldom do, she is duly hesitative on bridging her work from the online to the real world.

© Daniel Piaggio Strandlund

…

LINKS:
For the newbies amongst us, Urbanautica featured Artwall in the past.
An urbanautica-interview with Peter Waterschoot.

BY STEVE BISSON

1. Tell us about your current photographic research?

My current research is more about the language rather than about a specific topic or story . In the last two years I began an exploration’s process. Starting from the documentary photography I’m investigating other approaches to the images as the use of the archive, the appropriation and manipulation of documents. In my next project I would like to use also sculpture and audio-visual installation.

2. Let’s talk about the project ‘Big Sky Hunting’?

Big Sky Hunting is a fictional exploration of the outer space and it’s a journey into the space of representation. In today’s world, the images of space to which we have access, are extremely detailed and available to all via the internet. However, few realise that these images are not the product of a camera in the traditional sense of the word, but the extrapolation of data from electromagnetic waves to a receiver that are then interpreted and constructed by scientists. This interpretation, though rooted in science, remains human and therefore open to error and false perception. The project places the emphasis on the human mind’s capacity to create and imagine that which it wants to see, or better yet, that which it desires in order to create a protective shell

Big Sky Hunting maps unexplored territories, describes cold and perfect technologies and narrates futures already lived and constituted. This photographic representation is an illusion. Rather, it is the result of the appropriation and manipulation of various elements; the use of various 20th century materials such as original images, modified documents and archaic information. Big Sky Hunting It is an attempt to construct a new imagination for the Universe, documented through constellations of mould, vegetable planets and ancient maps.

The Big Sky Hunter elaborates, enhances and modifies the visual effect, deliberately not distinguishing between reality and fiction. Remaining within ambiguity, using error and paradox as fixed coordinates, in order to codify an imaginary chaos and, therefore, the Cosmos.

3. How did you get the idea for the book?

Big Sky Hunting has seen many phases but since the beginning it has been imagined to be a book. My partner Teresa Piardi is a graphic designer interested in book making and a collector of materials and papers. We wanted to to make a book since a long time and in 2013 we produced a first version of Big Sky Hunting as an artist book.
We want to do a proper book though and the turning point was when we were invited to submit a dummy to the Mack First Book Award. We built the book pretty much as you can see it today in three weeks.

4. It’s your first monography. How did you choose the editor ÉDITIONS DU LIC?  How did you managed it?

It was luck. Milo Montelli of Skinnerboox, the co-publisher of Big Sky Hunting, had the chance to show the dummy to Nicholas McLean, the founder of Edition Du Lic. I guess was love at first sight. He contacted me and we began the journey together.

5. What did your learn from this experience, plus and minus?

Plus: Making a book it’s a complex, challenging, beautiful process.
It’s a matter of details, every inch is important and It requires every inch of you. At the end it come to life and the object is there. The feeling is quite beyond words and I’m still trying to figured it out.

Minus: None

6. Plans for the future?

Right now we’re planning some events to promote the book and I’m working on an exhibition project which will have a different form from the book.

7. Can you suggest us 3 photography books that you liked?

I rather list three book I just had the chance to see at Paris Photo and I really liked:

- Sequester by Awoiska Van Der Molen
- Disguise and Deception by Anika Schwarzlose
- H. said he loved us by Tommaso Tanini

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INFO

750 copies
96 pages, 57 colour plates
Translucent tip-in pages
Silkscreen UV varnish pages
Foreword by Stafano Graziani
20.5 cm x 25.0 cm
Hot foil embossed hardcover with French fold dust cover
Offset printing
Éditions du LIC 2014

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© Alberto Sinigaglia | Urbanautica