BY SHEUNG YIU

Ask anyone in the local scene to make a list of great photography galleries in Hong Kong, The Salt Yard’ will no doubt be on the top of that list. Since its founding in 2013, The Salt Yard has opened a portal to international photography, a platform for scholastic exchange in contemporary photography. Being photographers themselves, the founders hold a specific vision, persistence and aesthetics on selecting noteworthy photographic work, a spirit that is rare to see in the commercial art hub like Hong Kong.

Last Saturday was their last opening party. As usual, The Salt Yard had its opening party two weeks after the actual opening of its exhibition. It is one of the peculiar things about The Salt Yard. It opens its exhibitions on weekdays and hold the opening party on the weekend week after. ‘Some photographers insist on opening on weekdays despite the fact that most people come on the weekends, so we move the opening party to the weekends instead.’ Dustin once told me.

The Salt Yard

It is not a big space but it has everything a photo enthusiast wanted, an independent photo bookstore and a small photo book library inside a photo gallery. It was designed to be the place for artists to hang out and share ideas. It is compact but perfect. And if that was not enough evidences to indicate its greatness, perhaps the guest list of the farewell party would. Many significant players came to say goodbye, among them the Chairman of Hong Kong International Photo Festival, Alfred Ko, Japanese photographer HAL, recent Hong Kong Photo Book Awards Winner, Dick Chan and renowned local photographer Paul Yeung.

Dustin and I talked about the future for The Salt Yard. We talked about how difficult it is to get government funding and we whined about the lack of photographically-educated audience. The gallery is short-lived, but it has created something really special. The venue may be gone for now but the gallery will live on as an online independent photo bookstore.

What is your intention of opening an independent photo gallery?

The venue was originally a commercial studio of the other two founders, Lit Ma and Gary Ma. Later in their career, they did fewer commercial studio shoots and the studio was left vacant often. Since I had some experience in organizing photo exhibitions and writing photo essays, they invited me to start a photographic art project making use of their space. Obviously, the most straight forward way is to turn it into a photo exhibition gallery.

The Salt Yard

Why the name, the Salt Yard?

That has something to do with history. In the Northern Song dynasty, Kwun Tong was an royalty-owned salt pan. Also, we all grew up in this district and witness the changes in Kwun Tong. We wanted to plant seeds of culture here. We hoped to show that photography, life and culture coexist.

Which photo exhibition are you most satisfied with?

Every exhibition is our child, and each gave me satisfaction (or dissatisfaction). The one I am most satisfied with is when my exhibitions draw people who are not frequent visitors of photo exhibitions or galleries, such as ‘When Coast Lilies Are In Blossom’, a photo exhibition about the 311 Tsunami in Japan. An elderly whose daughter married away to Fukushima came to the exhibition. Seeing the photographs comforted him. The moment made me realised the intimate connection between photographic work and its audience.

11/12/2011 Shidoke, Haramachi Ward, Minamisoma City, Fukushima Pref.
“I want to come here to have a walk. I have been thinking of it for a long time.” I say hello to this man as I feel curious why he, a non-local, walking around in the quake zone.

21/9/2011 Morioka-ekimaedori, Morioka City, Iwate Pref.
A 17-year-old mother. She looks uneasy with a child in her chest. But then my heart feel warm as I find that the child does not mind at all and is sleeping well.

What is your vision when designing The Salt Yard, a unique photography exhibition space?

Right from the start, we designed the space with the audience in our minds. Instead of seeing The Salt Yard as the platform for artists, creatives and photographers to show their work, we wanted to nurture a new audience, we wanted to build a more lively experience to appreciate photography, so we designed a space for reading and opened a independent bookstore. We do not have a receptionist. We let the audience move freely around the space and explore, instead of being a passive viewers.

What is your philosophy on curating? Can you tell us about your curating process?

I selected photographers mainly looking at the completeness of their photo work. Another thing is we hoped to include photography from around the globe, so we strived for geographical diversity in the photographers we picked and their relationship between their societies, their cultures and their photographic art, for example, Shen Chao-Liang’s ‘Stage’ and ‘When Coast Lilies Are In Blossom’ by Japanese photographer Kazutomo Tashiro.

The Salt Yard

The Salt Yard

What problems have you encountered in curating photo exhibition that you have never thought of before hand?

There are a lot of trivialities in the daily operation of a gallery, small things like cleaning to installation of an art piece to promotion, every thing needs a lot of energy to take care of. My friends and I work part time in the gallery so time management requires extra careful planning. Budget and finance are also tougher than we expected. In addition to all that, since our venue is not the easiest to get to nor an art hub, we did extra work to promote our exhibitions via different media to inform public about our gallery.

How is your experience negotiating with photographers and agencies around the world to exhibit their work in an independent gallery?

Many of the photographers are very positive and even excited about exhibiting their works in Hong Kong. Nearly all the photographers we have ever collaborated with have never had any solo exhibition here in Hong Kong, even for Chinese photographer Taca Sui. Despite that, I still need to spend some time explaining the nature and the philosophy of The Salt Yard to them, especially those with representation by galleries or agencies. We are not a commercial gallery. We do not have any sales representatives to facilitate trading. My work is to make sure that they do not have an illusion of a strong marketing opportunity through our exhibitions. Also, they always have strict restrictions on delivering image files for media promotion which always gives me headaches!

Cover of the last exhibition at The Salt Yard, ‘Illusion’ by Shoji Ueda.

Any useful comment for aspired people who would like to start an independent photo gallery?

My advice would be: Think throughly before action. Hong Kong is not exactly the best place for art. Aside from expensive rent, do not overestimate public’s passion about photo exhibitions. Having great works is not enough, you have to be patient and ready to nurture audience’s ability to understand and appreciate photography.

Although the venue is closing, the e bookshop will keep running as a continuation of the photo gallery. Can you tell us what have you planned for the online photo bookstore. Should we expect an expansion/ collaboration?

In the past, because we need to organize exhibition, the time and resources we invested on our online photo bookstore is limited. I will spend more time on exploring relatively alternative and independent photo book publishers hereinafter. Commercial consideration is not the sole reason for running our bookstore, we see it as a different way to promote work, we see it as ‘book curation’. We may participate in photo book related promotional activities.

What is ahead of you, the three founders, after Salt Yard?

First, more time on running our online photo bookstore. This needs huge amount of work. Lit and Gary will go on with their photography career, and I wish to spend more time on my own personal photo project. I will keep curating shows in the future given the chance.

Salt Yard is an artist-run, independent photography gallery in Hong Kong. Founded in 2013, The Salt Yard has produced several significant photo exhibitions, including ’The Game is Killing the Game’ and ‘When Coast Lilies are in Blossom’, a series of large format portraits of residents hugely impacted by the 311 Tsunami in Japan. The current exhibition ‘Illusion’, featuring the work of Shoji Ueda, is the gallery’s last exhibition. The gallery will continue running in the form of online photo bookstore.

The three co-founders, Lit Ma, Dustin Shum and Gary Ng (from left to right)

Lit Ma’s Bio:

Lit Ma is the founder team of Common Studio, The Salt Yard and the contributor photographer for Monocle. He is also a photojournalist for numerous press and publications. He received education from Hong Kong Christian Kwun Tong Vocational Training Centre in 2000 and Received his Bachelor Degree of Applied and Media Art at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2011.

Gary Ng’s Bio:

During the school years at Focal Point Visual Art Institute in 2003, Gary had already been working in the photography field, and mainly focused on commercial assignments. In 2009, Gary had moved back to Hong Kong from Vancouver and had started up Common Studio with Lit Ma, and in 2013, both had teamed up with Dustin Shum to create The Salt Yard.

Dustin Shum’s Bio:

A photojournalist for more than ten years, Dustin Shum now works as a freelance photographer. Shum has received many awards for outstanding documentary photography over the years, including those by the Hong Kong Press Photographers Association, and Amnesty International. In his work, Shum focuses on the relationship between individuals and urban spaces. In Jan 2013 he co-founded The Salt Yard, an independent, artist-run exhibition space dedicated to photography, where he curated a number of exhibitions by overseas and local photographers.

© Dustin Shum  |  The Salt Yard | urbanautica Hong Kong

BY FRANCESCA ORSI

I interviewed Stefano Tripodi creator of the edition ‘Sudario’ and founder of the association TVFL (The View From Lucania). Together I exchanged a few words with Salvatore Santoro, one of the artists involved in the publication.

1. Stefano what’s the idea behind the publishing project ‘Sudario’? Can you explain the title?

( Stefano Tripodi )  The project idea was born during one of the long and usual raids in Lucania from me and the director Andrea Fasciani. It was the winter of a couple of years ago, maybe more, and we had just met the photographer Filippo Romano, who had come to visit us. He had left us a bit of material produced in southern Italy. On that occasion, we created a video box that housed on a regular basis the contributions of artists who were filming in Southern Italy. It was the first Sudario (Shroud), we have already made three and they are all still visible on Vimeo channel of The View From Lucania. It was a very exciting, the first ‘Sudario’ was screened in some Italian festivals, and so I decided to transfer it to paper. The title ‘Sudario’ is a beautiful work of Andrea Fasciani. He is always very good at defining things, situations, applying a name, a label, and this thing works often. I’ve always told him that he would have to work as advertising, create slogans for advertising. Obviously it’s a joke, his work as a director is certainly what we need. The word ‘Sudario’, which contains within it the word Sud (South), is perfect to describe that filthy mixture of traditions, paganism, Christianity, crazy, hot, religious ecstasy, drunkenness and breathtaking beauty that is the south Italy. But the ‘Sudario’ is also a veil that the artist’s eyes alight on territories, things and people, whenever the artist confronts the South of Italy in an attempt to narrate. It is a cultural sheet that absorbs, filters, and returns. In this sense, the choice of printing in Risograph seemed interesting. Nothing is closer to the concept of the ‘Sudario’ that the technique of printing Risograph. The rice is unpredictable, uncontrollable, just like the south. And at the same time is the “veil” that filters everything, returning it inevitably changed. Many artists do not accept that their works are submitted to this technique. Get in the ‘Sudario’ project means accepting this filter, giving up all the nuances of color, marry the mono or bi-chromatic.

2. Tell us about The view from Lucania, the organization that you founded in 2010 and through which you developed the project ‘Sudario’.

The View From Lucania comes from the need to find a relationship with Southern Italy, a land that I left when I was 19 years old. After more than a decade I arrived in Milan, at the time I attended the Advanced Training in Photojournalism Agency contrast, a dramatic bluff, one of many rotten horses in the world of photography and Italy. There, I met photographers every day, many were good, and this was the only interesting thing. So I finally decided to involve some and I took them in Lucania, which is the homeland of my father’s family. Despite the big names, few have given something in terms of truth, adherence, novelty. Many have come to take a vacation, or to repair marriages in the balance, to drink, eat and make small talks. It was fun. There were those who came out of the bedroom with a sheet in their hands, and with a beard made and sleepy face, and shouting an idea. I still have those notes, they are tender. I thought the Lucania was the right place in the South where to give birth to a project and say things. The relationship with nature is very high, the population density is low, there is room to think, this is important.

For four years I have proposed courses, curated by photographers, filmmakers, film editors, sound engineers. It is not always gone well, no one has ever sponsored, TVFL is an anarchist and independent project. At first I wondered for the spaces, then I decided to do everything in my house. I felt it was consistent, the domestic dimension returns an intimacy that can not be found elsewhere. The students ate with us, slept, shared rooms, was a continuous flow. 

The only time I worked with a local institution was the exhibition of Domingo Milella ‘Orli estremi di qualche età sepolta’  curated by 3/3, a wonderful experience in cooperation with the town of Castelmezzano, a village of extraordinary beauty. You know, I grew up in those places, with my family we went there when we could, especially in the summer. It was the most beautiful childhood that a person could ever want. Then one day, I had this idea, it was the Easter of 2010, I went to visit my brother, who at the time was studying at Urbino Academy, and now he is a digital designer. The project name is his idea, I think it has been inspired by ‘The view from the road’ by Kevin Lynch. The font used is the Titillium, an open source that my brother has helped to develop. 

Finally, I then spent some time in Lucania, alone, in order to feel it, hear it and to see the changing of the seasons. For months I wandered around, I slept in the car or in a tent, walked riverbeds without water, in summer, to move from one country to another. I met pastors, men with rifles, hermits. I slept in abandoned villages, eating at the tables of families who hosted me. I saw several wolves in the woods of Gallipoli Cognato. I felt the need to assimilate this wonderful land. This is the way to sincere thoughts. Today TVFL focused to develop its publishing activities, not forgetting the value of teaching. We are trying to understand, in fact, how to offer a cultural exchange. The world of the workshop is now old, tired, clogged, and devoid of good ideas.

3. In the number #0 of ‘Sudario’ there were 7 artists interspersed  (Carlo Bitetti, Andrea Fasciani, Aldo La Capra, Antonio Macrì, Pietro Motisi, Salvatore Santoro, Stefano Tripodi). How to they communicate with each other and how they are incorporated into the project?

I personally supervised the project ‘Sudario’, both the selection and invitation of the artists. After selecting them, you need to check on the paper how does the relationship between the message and aesthetics work. Two images can run close together, but may not be the same for the message, the thread that binds them together. After several attempts and after excluding some artists and much of the material that I had shot, we have achieved the right balance. Each artist has a value and a clear weight. It was interesting to take responsibility to understand how the images could talk.

4. The graphic design has its meaning and its value in the production of ‘Sudario’. Tell us about the “double” cover…

The double cover is an excellent insight by Andrea Zambardi  and Sara Bianchi, founders of ATTO, the graphic design studio that works on ‘Sudario’. I think they had already experienced this choice, but the right idea was to superimpose the photographic portrait of the brigand Crocco with one of the drawings of Antonio Macrì. It created an interconnection which tied all together, strengthening it. The two images are incredibly close. The design of Macrì has, then, something exotic which creates a moment of disorientation and manages to capture attention. I asked to ATTO to do what they wanted, but to be minimal. They were great, when they asked me to print in Risograph they knew it was a strong choice. Reasoning by subtraction would have created a strong graphic design, and at the same time provide the right space to the iconographic research.

5. Could you explain to us the relationship between text and image in ‘Sudario’?

This is a good question. To me the text has the same value of the photographic image. It is a narrative in the narrative, another possible way. Image and text have a bond, because the text is made of many minuted images, but at the same time they are untied. You can take the narrative spores I wrote, detach them, and read them separately. It would be nice to do 10 numbers of ‘Sudario’ with these literary spores, maybe it’s a road that I will continue to follow. I like to mix the languages, photography can be boring when is self-referential. Generally I get bored with photography, I find it hard to find nice things. So I thought to insert those little stories in the ‘Sudario’ would give a sense of openness.

6. A preview of the next issue…

The next issue is the # 1, an important number. It should be out in the summer. I did not hurry and I do not have pressure on the timing. I’m trying to figure out whether to start the discussion of thematic numbers or not. What is certain is that we will make the selection, there will never be any call for entries. With ‘ATTO’ we will choose the color to use. The number zero is made of black and blue, you know this color thing interests me very much. Establish the color map of the fanzine. The next issue will be very experimental, I want to abandon certain types of classical narrative typical of photography. We will See!

7. For each author two pages. In this way the chosen image has a strong representative and iconic character. What made you choose your own?

( Salvatore Santoro ) Actually I gave everything, almost everything in the hands of Stefano. The self-representation is not for me. I sent him my selection of photographs. A selection that was perhaps characteristic, but not representative… or maybe it’s an excuse, maybe they represent me all. Well I have to think about this. In the selection there were also some photographs that are not in the book, so as to give a little bit of choice available, and to make uniform the work of Stephen. The final choice I liked, I like the whole magazine.

8. Your image is perhaps the one that has more documentary” connotations. How does it relate to the rest of the iconographic corpus of ‘Sudario’?

Well there are faces, people. It is a documentary, at least in its origin, but relocated in the context of ‘Sudario’ these images have  a built-in function, and of course a lot depends on what is there before and after. ‘Sudario’ is not a documentary - at least not conventional - and the use of images is functional to an interpretation which moves in various directions.

9. As the project ‘Sudario’ fits in your photographic research?

‘Sudario’ is a work by Stefano that fits in my library rather than in my research: I am a user of it. Ok, I have contributed to the first issue, but for now I’m working on other things. Perhaps this year I’ll be able to complete the third work, but still I do not know if it will be a book. We will See. ‘Sudario’ is a very interesting project, and the use that makes of various “vocabularies” is very interesting. So it is part of my research as an object of study.

TVFL | urbanautica Italy

BY GABRIELA SCHUTZ

In this exhibition the artists Adrian Barron, Liron Lupu, Irith Gubi and Gabriela Schutz are trying to illuminate the concept of the home; as a dream, a shelter, a financial investment or a political act. They are fascinated with the uneasy relationship between the nostalgic Technicolor tinted fantasy, and the frequently brutal reality.

Building in Israel these days is often done by contractors and in many cases is political. Ready- made houses with city planning and playgrounds are a rung in the real- estate ladder; Contemporary fortresses viewing a primordial and provoking landscape, a ‘Wall & Tower’ in the Holy Land. 

Installation view ‘There is No Place like Home’

© Irith Gubi

The name of the exhibition relates to Dorothy from the ‘The Wizard of Oz’ who needed to click her heels 3 times, (a central number in fairly tales), in order to return home from the fantasy world back to reality. In the movie, Oz is a colourful and spectacular land as opposed to the ‘Black and White’ reality where she comes from. The artists of this show are interested in the dissonance between these two positions. 

In Adrian Barron’s etchings, he relates to a series of books- ‘Janet and John’ that was popular in the teaching of schoolchildren throughout the 50’s to the 70’s in the UK. In his work ‘Janet and John in Spain’ he teaches the naive children about accumulation of capital and capitalism. In ‘Landing’ Barron kept the original text but changed the illustrations from aeroplanes into tanks. War in his view, is part of the human condition and therefore will not go away in the foreseeable future. Its repetitive nature lends itself well to the nature of print. ‘Ink Blots from the Emerald City’ relates to the capital of Oz where all the citizens are required to wear green tinted glasses, therefore seeing everything green.  The Rorschach blots that are meant to reflect on the observer’s mind, impose only one way of viewing them.

© Irith Gubi

Liron Lupu’s paintings present pastoral settlements and landscape across the Green Line. They are arenas for violent scenes of executions, firing ranges and carcasses consumed by prey. But even when the scenes look innocent, like those where we see farmers on tractors or donkeys, the red sky and the vultures hint at a bitter ending.  The strong and almost naive use of colour looks as if taken from old children’s books. By using the aesthetics of Zionist propaganda posters from the 40’s and 50’s Lupu creates connection between the zeal of the first settlers who founded Israel, and between the current desire to erect a house whatever the cost is.

Irith Gubi ‘s photographs also deal with the dissonance between reality and the pastoral. With meticulous composition, perfect lighting and situations that seem to have been directed, Gubi narrates the story of Israel and its landscapes.  She loves excursions and trips, waiting for the eccentricities that only reality can provide. In many of her works there is longing for a past that was gone, but often reality invades, and spoils the wilderness.  

Installation view ‘There is No Place like Home’

© Irith Gubi

Gabriela Schutz experiences Israel as a local and an outsider, (having lived in London for 16 years). The longing for the people, vegetation and climate is mixed with a distant perspective and a deep disappointment with the unresolved political situation.  The ‘Holyland’ series relates to the Romantic aesthetics and depiction of the Levant and the Holy Land by travellers and artists from Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. In her work the distance between ‘Holywoodian’ fantasy and a blazing reality is being revealed only when we understand that that the strategically dominating settlements on the tops of the mountains are Jewish, and that they are in Palestine. The Arcadian landscape is not so pastoral after all.

The space between fantasy, dreams, fiery vision and belief, and  between complicated and charged reality, is the topic of this show, where the home and the house are the vehicles to examine it. Perhaps if we click our heels 3 times and say ‘there is no place like home’, reality and fantasy will become one essence.

© Irith Gubi | urbanautica Israel

BY DIETER DEBRUYNE

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


My master project at the KASK Ghent was the ‘real starting point’. I made a documentary about a gated retirement community in Florida, the series “The Fountains where living is a pleasure!” (2003) which combines portraits, still lifes, interiors and reportage style photographs. I lived and photographed for 2 months in the closed and walled living area that was exclusively for the elderly. “King&Queen” is the main picture of the series. Every year the most popular man and woman were elected. The portraits still reflect four characteristics that are important in my work. The documentary nature of my photography. The straightforward visual language that I chose (which is reflected in thematic series), I attach great importance to aesthetic choices: refined images, balanced compositions with a particular emphasis on color. Despite the sensational character of my topic, and the humoristic tone, I wish to approach the participants with respect and photograph them in their full dignity. And I like to capture a tension between theatricality and everydayness in one photographic image.

© Charlotte Lybeer, The Shell, from the series ‘Kingdom of Discovery’, China, 2007

During my two years of post graduate study at the Higher Institute for Fine Art Antwerp I focused more on gated lifestyle communities in South-Africa (Woodhill, gated lifestyle community 2005).  Subsequent to it, I made  documentary projects in an indoor beach complex in Germany (My Tropical Island 2006) more contemporary themeparks where photographed in China (Kingdom Of Discovery 2007) and in Dubai I focused on gated communities, theme parks and streetscaped malls (Dubai Inc. 2008) .

© Charlotte Lybeer, Global Village - from the series ‘Dubai Inc.’, 2008

For those projects I examine applications of what the philosopher Lieven De Cauter calls the ‘capsular civilization’ . In the same book from 2004, he sketches the image of a society dominated by fear, exclusion and simulation. Those safe and completely controlled zones that simulate a paradisical atmosphere,are constructed by property developers in a meeting room and usually have nothing to do with the original site.  The success of these enclaves proves that although we live in a ‘borderless’ society we still yearn for manageability.  An architectural decor is created that becomes a staging in which the occupant can escape everyday reality.  

© Charlotte Lybeer, Jacuzzi, from the series ‘Woodhill, gated lifestyle community’, South Africa, 2005

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

My recent work centralizes people who physically step over the boundaries of fantasy. Recently I photographed people who define their identity through codes and masquerades that demonstrate membership to one group while distancing themselves from mainstream society. I portray subcultures that are related to virtual three dimensional worlds, where players construct a second identity online. It is characteristic that these trans-human identities also be adopted outside the virtual world. Those photographic projects visualize how people respond to a changing world: a world that expands geographically but is also increasingly imaginary. In those series I want to capture the isolation and stillness of my subjects, their escapist desire to become the character of a dream, shaped by film, virtual reality and games.  

‘Larp, taking a holiday from everydayness’ (2009) consists of 20 Flemish and Dutch LARP players.  LARP stands for “Live Action Role Playing”, a game in which participants transform themselves into self invented characters inspired by games, movies or fantasy literature.  “The Furtastic Adventures of The Cabbit and The Folf” (2011- 2012) emphasizes the furry fandom and consists of ‘fan groups’ of anthropomorphic animal characters with human personalities. I photographed Belgian, Dutch, French and German members of the furry fandom. In those twenty portraits, I have taken back the so called furries to their own living rooms. The costumes that show us the participant’s character when in ‘furry mode’ clashes with the homely atmosphere that reveal small things about the participant when ‘out of character.’

© Charlotte Lybeer, Forfaox - from the series ‘The Furtastic Adventures of The Cabbit and The Folf’, 2011-2012

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

I’m convinced that in-depth research and photographical documentary experiments are necessary in our visual culture that has to deal with an oversupply of digitally manipulated images (in art, commercial and even press photography)   I’m sure it can be usefull for the next generations and I find it necessary to document (period just after the digital revolution) the surrealism of our reality. The world of digital and social networking is developing fast and that’s stressfull but on the other side there’s an interesting urge to counterbalance, to photograph and present work where we can escape this rapidity and instead , slow down. 

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

As a photographer I try to combine the curiosity of the journalist researching actual phenomena – symptoms of the global, capitalist crisis – the empathy of the detective infiltrating enclosed worlds, and the sensibility to capture the way fiction transforms reality.

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


Since 2007 I’m working digital with my Canon 5D, before I photographed analogue with a Pentax 6/7. 

© Charlotte Lybeer, Lunar Route (Lanzarote 2014), from the series ‘Champagne Dreams on a Beer Budget, (2002-2014)

6. Tell us about your latest project.

‘Lifestyle Supermarket’ is my phd project and consists of uncanny portraits and close-up shots of members of the zentai community. Zentai is a term for skin-tight (often flesh-coloured ) suits worn to cover the whole body that allows people to transform into a new ‘simplified’ self.  The feeling of being totally enclosed and separated from the rest of the world. Those subcultures are of Japanese origin, but I choose to photograph in Belgium and our neighbouring countries where this alienation is less expected. 

I invite the members to my own living space and frame the photograph in a way that the viewer can only see a wooden floor, a white wall, a grey carpet,… A choice that represents the idea that it could be anybody anywhere. A generic atmosphere where humans transform into silhouettes which more resembles nude manikins or default avatars. In the act of disguising and movement, I capture a moment of stillness when they transform from their natural identity into a faceless form.  

I chose the title after reading the book ‘Cyberspace Odyssey’. Jos De Mul describes postmodern society as “a supermarket of lifestyles” where the individual is deemed to shop together his identity.  Due to the enormous developments in the field of transport, communication, social and personal life (changing gender roles, leisure industry) the number of activities in which the postmodern man can give practical meaning to itself and the multiplicity of social roles he plays has increased. The ‘personal identity’ is no longer accepted as fact, but rather as a never-ending task.

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

The masters such as Diane Arbus, Stephen Shore and William Eggleston are a big influence for me. But definitely also the younger generations, such as Peter Granser, Viviane Sassen and Hannah Starkey. And absolutely every project Paul Graham made, from “A1 The Great North Road” until “Does Yellow Run Forever”.

8. Three books of photography that you recommend?


-  ‘Revelations’ by Diane Arbus
- ‘The Valley’ by Larry Sultan
- ‘Uncommon Places - The Complete Works’ by Stephen Shore 

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

The retrospective exhibition of Jeff Wall at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Philip - Lorca diCorcia at De Pont, Tilburg.

© Charlotte Lybeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring Turkije, 2011 from the series ‘Champagne Dreams on a Beer Budget, (2002-2014)

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

I just finished a presentation of “The Furtastic Adventures of The Cabbit and The Folf” in the Gare du Nord Paris for the Circulations Festival, a festival for young European photography. I’m working on an exhibiton for De Kunsthal Rotterdam. And I’m working on a book with my recent series and solo exhibition at Netwerk Aalst (beginning 2016).

11. How do you see the future of photography evolve?

Because photography is everywhere it will be more and more difficult to stand out. But that’s a challenge and I see the future positive with many new approaches. Every year I’m surprised and amazed by new work of “the big names” in the world of contemporary photography but also by our students. So the future’s promising!

© Charlotte Lybeer | urbanautica Belgium

BY STEVE BISSON

1. Usually I conclude my interviews with an eye on the future, a way perhaps to relativize or to place myself distant from the fact of being too much in the present. After looking at your portfolio I am curious instead to start from how you imagine your future work?


Future is a bit my middle name these days, and yet I struggle to be in the present! I imagine more voltage, happiness and freedom. A spring-like energy is running through my life after a radical shift in perspective happened in 2014, when I was diagnosed as neurodivergent. A massive restructuring of my identity followed a paradigm collapse and I had to unlearn ways of thinking about myself. Since then I have been meeting many new people who are also on the spectrum to share about our life experiences. Self-ignorance, as well as oppressive, fearful and inhibiting influences had narrowed my natural breathing space. Now I’m practicing Rumi’s « Be with those who help your being » and learning to spread my wings again. Ultimately, I continue to work on releasing mental scripts of how life is supposed to unfold, to welcome surprising opportunities and the excitement of the unknown. In my mind, the future is associated with improvements, with excitement and hope, and with generously passing on the benefits of creative energy. By feeling more grounded, optimistic, peaceful, confident, I don’t internalize others’ fears about being wild or different. I’m laying down the foundations of a life structure that allows me to thrive in the world as neurodivergent so I can fully explore my true abilities and not hold back or be thwarted. I’m realizing that I need rock solid, cooperative friendships and empowering, supportive networks free of draining power struggles or shadowy dynamics. 

© Eva Wollenberg, ‘Strix Nebulosa’

I’m very inspired by what people like Temple Grandin, Josef Schovanec, Glenn Gould, Grigori Perelman or Nikola Tesla achieved on many levels. Their visions help me to stay true to my nature, to trust the fact I’ll find my road, and to know that there is a true place in the world for the person I truly am, no matter how different. The difficult part is also to find one’s own realistic vision of oneself, not as defined by others — particularly because within in my neurodivergent spectrum, people put all these extreme labels on you. They struggle to accept the real story, cling to stereotypes, and these can lead to bullying out of fear or ignorance. Various discussions with similar people have made me realize the amount of abuse we neurodivergent people put up with, especially women and those born into disadvantaged social classes. The balance of power and justice is incredibly unbalanced and we have to fight for fairness, equality, and respect. Each individual empowering himself can be a small step towards addressing our global problems. 


© Eva Wollenberg, ‘Strix Nebulosa’

2. Tell us about the project ‘Strix Nebulosa’. It is curious as its meditative flavor filters through the screen. It also exudes an almost theatrical aftertaste though the shots are impregnated with naturalness.


My main visual influence is cinema. It is a delicate balance, as the more you try to control life, the more you extinguish it, so you have to work with chaos, accidents! It is all a transference screen and characters exist in a timeless dreamlike state. ‘Strix Nebulosa’ is rooted in that neurodivergence of mine and in my perception of the world, each light has a character. I have a synesthetic relation to them and a light obsession since birth. My condition makes me perceive my environment with such an intensity and extreme refinement, there are constant streams of incoming stimuli, a giant spiderweb of intense sensations. It is difficult to capture such colossal perception and trap it in a flat, rectangular, limited, surface. One needs, as you say, to enter a meditative state to imagine what it feels like, to open, welcome new experience, broaden perspective. Light is sculpting all of us everyday, we should take time to notice, admire the beauty of it. We take that magic for granted, the same way we take water and air for granted. ‘Strix Nebulosa’ is a visual poem about two specific wavelengths I love very much, feel attuned to, find very soothing since birth. It stimulates the same zone of my being as my interest in astronomy, some fluorite stone or prism I own, my Richard Feynman book about Light and Matter or a photograph of the Waitomo Glowworm Caves. It is how my mind organizes things and makes sense, thematic and very precise, interconnected. The same way Earth’s atmosphere filters some wavelengths, or animals perceive only some others, in that work I want to select, focus, filter.  

3. Another essential feature of your current search is your eclectic attitude. The observer slides between different languages that seem formulated to give life to a voice rather performative, and that perhaps is better suited to be expressed in an installation.


I fully agree with you, I envision it as an ecosystem, or various organs in a body. Such approach is very fulfilling. The artists I like most are nearly all polymaths with a generous approach, for example Patti Smith, Björk, Nick Cave or David Lynch. The person is the core, what is holding it all together. I like when things develop like rain forests, or treasure islands, with diversity. How I loved when David Lynch decided to release some music! The same way, I like diversity in a society, melting pots, a cosmopolitan spirit. I have a phobia of monoculture, it scares me. The installation part is very true, I dream of creating interactive installations, immersive experiences. I’d love to meet more people who are knowledgeable in domains of hi-tech, new technologies, to learn from them.


« I knew I could trust the ground, feel it and talk to it, lay in the fields, and plow the furrow deep with my feet. The ground was for me stable and predictable, with a generous nurturing function. I used to kiss the earth and always felt amazingly loved by it. So I became an island »
Eva Wollenberg

4. Tell us about your relationship with literature, a recurring ingredient in your work. The writing accompanying the images and becomes indispensable to hold together the narrative. I like the fact that sometimes the images seem to become the captions of the texts. This dialogue between word and image changes and evolves in your works, and I think that in this apparent imbalance lies one of the roots of your creative work.


It is with language itself, literature’s bones, that my relation is most complex. I learn languages in few weeks in general, read a 500 pages book in few hours, but also have strange learning disabilities and don’t think in words but in images, and 3D. It is like a minefield, I could easily remain mute a whole year younger, keeping it all within, then invented alphabets, or annoyed my teachers as I was writing all my lessons reversed, from right to left. To find my own language has been the battle of my life. Talking is often associated with extreme discomfort, overwhelming and debilitating shyness; I truly thought in the past there were perfect words, couldn’t talk at all because I didn’t find them, so the fear of misunderstandings paralyzed my ability to communicate. When I wanted to share my complex thoughts architecture, open the mouth, there was an icy wall between me and others. I think my friend Olivier Pin-Fat is very right when he says that his photographs are like sentences, and his written texts are full of images. I can really relate to such vision. Words are like synaptic connections and poetry moves me in a way photography doesn’t. I once cried half an hour in the street because of three lines by Paul Celan, that never happened to me with photography. Or, when some writer friend sends me beautiful texts of his, I feel on a cloud for days, as if our minds started to merge. The feeling of bonding, happiness and understanding is indescribable. Right now, I mostly need to read short poems. Anne Carson is my current love. I did read ‘Autobiography of Red’ aloud in the night of September 19Th and felt a new universe was opening. I think she is changing how I see, feel, think, and says it well: «Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.»

© Eva Wollenberg, Notes book

5. In this recourse to poetry, or in this poetic making, I see entering your editorial productions. Formidable, unique and original. Tell us about them.


Thank you very much. I wanted to experiment with a Wabi-Sabi approach, embrace fragility, imperfection, something raw. I see a lot of beauty in what is rare and delicate. These are humble productions, owned mostly by artist friends. Feral Leaves is a recent one, I used the beak of a bird skull found on an island to write the texts. There are unique edition silver-based photographs and photograms in it, dissolved, left drying in the wind. A beloved writer friend owns it now. I am happy, it is safe with him, truly loved. Faust is a sealed blackout poetry unique book. The way I read and see makes me naturally able to see poems hidden in blocks of text at lightning speed, and I do blackout poetry to soothe myself, focus my intense mind, calm it down. Such poetry appears when I feel very mute and dig to find language again. It is a very personal healing process. I’d love to print my first books also (photography and poetry), look for funding and support. One of my degrees is in design and I have a many ideas but remain open.

© Eva Wollenberg, unique Wabi-sabi glass book containing poems of the books Penser avec les dents, Les cahiers de chute et d’ire (first volume), and Penser avec les dents, Les cahiers d’ivresse nova (second volume). On the glass plates you can see high mountains, waterfalls, glaciers, and sometimes a discreet human presence. 9 ancient stereoscopic positive glass plates, archival ink, original ancient cardboard box. Box: 2.6 × 5.5 inches Glass plates: 2.4 × 5.1 inches (each 0.03 inches thick)


6. I feel like your way of working although inserted in the experience of the technique (whether photographic or video) gives us the opportunity for a « naked » glance. That is, the look is a question of truth and no longer a form of acceptance.


My eyes are full of many photographs I never took, and maybe these are hidden in the ones I took, somewhere, like ghosts, taproots. All that beauty offered to the wind has to be somewhere, in experience, certain tastes, choices. Some photographs can be seen as the confirmation of the possibility of grace, the sublime, delicate, what makes life bearable. We are what we see, I think, there are so many projections going on. The look is a door, what allows such rare phenomena to take place. And, well, when you study quantum physics, the ideas of reality and truth are complicated ones. There is a Rashômon effect going on. If truth was a monolith, there wouldn’t be so much philosophers, scientists, artists, mystics scratching their heads since we are conscious to be alive. It’s in our nature to roam and seek it, we test our understanding, build experience. The look also is something we work on like a scholar. The more I grow old, the more I wonder what matters most. Truths or how we use the truths we think we know? Because, «A truth that’s told with bad intent / Beats all the lies you can invent.» William Blake wrote wisely. I am a seeker, it takes a lifetime to maybe find rare and humble answers. Look at us humans, so vulnerable, living on a small round little sphere in the middle of nowhere. What are we supposed to do with that condition? All the rules we create, then change, seem to discover, then erase, then re-discover, endlessly asking Why? Our whole condition is a state of nakedness in front of the unknown, maybe the idea of Truth is what we need to invent to make it all bearable in front of the intuition of greater chaos, a safety net. Can all of that be contained in our look? Lightning is to light what an image is to horizon. Both matter. The microscope and the telescope. I’m just a human somewhere on Earth trying to find meaning, experimenting with it, interested in seekers.

© Eva Wollenberg, ‘Strix Nebulosa’

7. About the performative dimension of your research


I have a great collaborative friendship going on for 16 years now, with the experimental composer Sunnstede, we start to release things together and he is one of the most important persons in my life. We both come from the underground rock and alternative culture, these roots are always somewhere, and I think we are a bit itchy right now, need to explore. I loved to see Bill Viola work with Nine Inch Nails for example. Video or photographic projections during music/dance shows or theater plays interest me particularly.


© Eva Wollenberg, ‘Strix Nebulosa’, Révolution Cardique

8. The relationship with space, nature, a place. Standing in a place, as philosophical exercise, to inhabit our own questions. The photographer becomes a place. The place becomes the photographer. What are your favorite places and how you choose to interact with them?


I’m interested right now in Michel Foucault’s vision of heterotopias, discovered it and dig into it slowly. My favorite places are places where I can be fully myself, uninhibited. When one is with a beloved, and feels really loved for who one is, even a pile of dirt turns into a wonderful place. On a purely physical level, my soul needs to see the horizon, the sky. I love also the dramatic and accidented shapes of mountains, woods, lakes, black moor soils full of blueberries, wild beaches. Something untamed and not too hot suits me most. I scan visually, collect edible wild plants, need to touch, taste, smell, listen. I let such places offer me surprising opportunities, make my boundaries porous to be a discreet presence in harmony with animals. 

© Eva Wollenberg, ‘Strix Nebulosa’

I love to go on some alpine-like mountain here, lie on the soft moor ground, cuddle, nest like an animal, and contemplate sunset or the blue lines of the mountains. I have all day and night constantly in my ears the sound of the river and the waterfall, wild animals sounds. It all just invades me without conscious awareness after living here since childhood. It sculpts my imagination, emotions, whole being. Sounds are spaces, too. My current home is an humble and small unique room, a mix between an eagle nest in front of the woods and a writer’s retreat dedicated to the Muses from morning to evening. Cozy Spartan could be a way to describe the paradox of my living situation right now. The next years I want to travel, need to go down a specific old magma chamber that attracts me, precisely to inhabit my own questions. On that level, Josef Schovanec truly inspires me a lot, ‘Eloge du voyage à l’usage des autistes et de ceux qui ne le sont pas assez’ is the story of a luminous divergent walking laboratory using travel as therapy, with humour. To go away in order to be fully oneself, find places where our quirks, instead of being shamed, are seen as beautiful and glorious!

© Eva Wollenberg | urbanautica France

BY RENATA SCOVINO

The title of the Thomas Mann’s novel ‘The Magic Mountain’ from an excerpt of ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ (1870-71) in which Nietzsche says, «the Olympian magic mountain opens itself before us, showing its very roots… ». The German philosopher, believed that while we climb mountains we have a clear understanding of what life is. The misadventures of the climb would be precisely the difficulties, pain, problems, mistakes and misfortunes that we face. The path of ascent is marked along the way by moments of satisfaction interspersed with these “stones”, yet compensated by the general effort. Metaphorically he spoke of human existence as a pilgrimage, a walk, a journey.

A pilgrimage coincides not only with the act of walking, or the execution of a path of a certain number of miles; it is recognized that a pilgrimage must be motivated “by” or “for” something.

The first photobook, ‘Topographies du mensonge’ by the artist Sue-Elie Andrade-Dé is about this pilgrimage. In particular, an unresolved family situation that leads on a trip to the birthplace of her father. Isolation, reconciliation and a need for understanding after a discovery that opens a crack in the crust creates a bridge between present and past. The reopening of a wound as a space for an immediate and profound change.

The result of such a journey is a rich work, full of paths and layers. It is the impossibility of narrating a time that has just begun and that still can not be fully understood. Perhaps it’s just a chance for pointing out how much more lucid it is to seek meanings in the future rather than in the past. Or perhaps just to wonder if the act of seeking still makes sense.

Sue-Elie Andrade-dé | Noize Book | urbanautica Brazil

BY SHEUNG YIU

© Nancy Sheung, The Pigtail, 1966. Silver gelatin print, Courtesy of Tiffany Wai-Ying Beres and the Pong Family

The more I interview photographer, the more I am sure that format, education and socioeconomic background does not matter when it comes to creating great work. Some photographers starts from the slum, some earned a master in photography, some shot frequently with no particular idea on their mind while some conduct intensive research before shooting. The critical element of great photography are vision and passion. And the ultimate example to illustrate this is Nancy Sheung (常惠珍).

© Nancy Sheung

Nancy Sheung was middle-aged when she started photography, she had never received any formal art training, she had kids and she was a woman in the 60s in China, in the era when women are expected to do nothing outside of their family. Yet, none of these stop her from her photography career. She made photography her passion and excel at it, she was listed the world’s top ten photographers of monochrome prints from 1967-1972 and a five-star exhibitor of the Photographic Society of America.

© Nancy Sheung standing next to her work at a photo salon

Female photographers are rare in the sixties. In 1966, the sixth Chinese Photographic Association of Hong Kong member photography exhibition, there were only 3 female members including Nancy, among about 100 members. Most of them either came from rich families or married to photographers. Daisy Wu (吳程玉湖), is among all, the most internationally renowned Hong Kong female photographer in the period. She was born and raised in the United States and married to Francis Wu (吳章健), the first Hong Kong members of the expatriates-dominated Photographic Society of Hong Kong and a fellow commercial portrait photographer.In 1954, she won the first prize of Popular Photography magazine photo contests and was invited on a seminar tour across the US. She had her first solo exhibition in Hong Kong in 1956.

© Chinese Beauties by Daisy Wu and Francis Wu

© Chinese Beauties by Daisy Wu and Francis Wu

Dr. Edwin Lai, an expert on history of Hong Kong photography, was puzzled by the lack of female photographers in the sixties and seventies. Despite that the photography community are mainly male, Lai did not observe any intentional exclusion of female photographers. In fact, female enthusiasts often participated in shooting sessions organised by the clubs. Lai quoted the article ‘Why have there been no great women artists’ by art historian Linda Nochlin to explain the phenomenon. Just as in Western society, women’s role as caretakers are confined their lives to family in Hong Kong. Sylvia Ng, another speaker of the seminar and the ex-chief editor of Photo Pictorial agreed. As a female photographer in the seventies, she put families before everything. On top of that, photography was not as affordable as it is nowadays thus women, who rarely earned much at the time, had no chances to enter photography.

The exhibition also opens up a discourse on salon photography. Hong Kong salon photography started in about 1920s. The Photographic Society of Hong Kong, the first of its kind in Hong Kong, was founded in 1937. It was a expatriates-dominated organization which members participant in international photo salon. The trend could be traced back to 19th century pictorialism movement when photographers began to run photography club and entered international photo salon competition, in the hopes of establishing photography as fine art. As salon grew in popularity, the term ‘salon photography’ gradually took over ‘pictorialism’ to connote photography that seeks formality, eye-catching aesthetic and exuberant composition.

© Nancy Sheung

The fifties and sixties were the golden age of salon photography in Hong Kong. In fact, Hong Kong was once ‘the asian epicentre of photography’. Photographers of the period were productive and competitive. They shot regularly, printed out their work to take part in monthly competition at photography clubs and sent their work our to compete in international salons. The 25 photos of Nancy Sheung shown in this exhibition were made with an ambition to win prizes, the formalism, studio lighting and deliberate darkroom techniques come as no surprise. This genre of photography along with pure historical archival prints dominated Hong Kong photography.

© Nancy Sheung’s edit of the same photograph

In the 4th and last issue of the photo magazine Klack, Ki Wong discussed the change of salon photography since 1970s. From the school girls awkwardly posed ‘pretty studio salon photos’ of the seventies to the amateur group shooting of young female models of the noughties . In recent years, the term ‘Lung Yau’(龍友), or salon enthusiasts, increases in prevalence. ‘Lung Yau’ describes photo amateurs whose main photographic interest lies on young women, flowers, bird or other traditionally pictorial photo subjects. Some of them invest heavily on latest photo equipment. The term often has a negative connotation and has affected general public’s impression of a photographer. The influence of salon photography is eminent throughout the history of Hong Kong. In my opinion, it has shifted the definition and aesthetic of photography in Hong Kong, cultivating a very narrow audience and an outdated view of photography from the rest of the world.

© Nancy Sheung, Gaze, 1960s. Silver gelatin print, Courtesy of Tiffany Wai-Ying Beres and the Pong Family

© Nancy Sheung, The Long Haired Girl, 1960s. Silver gelatin print, Courtesy of Tiffany Wai-Ying Beres and the Pong Family

Nancy Sheung’s strong personality and determination are the reasons that she made it to the photography scene. Ms. Beres, Nancy’s granddaughter who contacted Dr. Lai to curate her work, said that Sheung would often use extreme measures to get a photograph. If she wanted to shoot inside at a stranger’s apartment, she would bang on the door and talked until the stranger succumbed. The diabetic photographer passed away in her darkroom in 1979.

Ms. Beres is communicating with other interested parties such as Hong Kong Heritage Museum for a bigger solo exhibition. We can expect more exhibitions and even a photo book of Nancy Sheung in the near future.

Installation view of ‘Rare Encounters: Nancy Sheung’s Portraits of Hong Kong Women in the 1960s’ at Lumenvisum

“Rare Encounters: Nancy Sheung’s Portraits of Hong Kong Women in the 1960s”* is the first major exhibition of Nancy Sheung’s work in Hong Kong since her death in 1979. The 25 images in the exhibition presents an intimate glance at her photographic work with women of the period, photos with a highly distinctive sensibility for capturing drama, beauty, and the female spirit. The exhibition began on 7th March till 12th April at Lumenvisum.

© Lumenvisum | urbanautica Hong Kong

BY SYLVIE DE WEZE

With the diptych exhibition‘Faces Then & Faces Now’ the BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels confronts Renaissance portraiture in the Low Countries with the photographic portrait in Europa since 1990. The result is an intriguing (re)discovery of ancient masterpieces and top photographers. BOZAR has a tradition of juxtaposing today’s art with that of yesterday, but with this exhibition BOZAR has really surpassed itself.

© Denis Darzacq, Group 01, Act 50, 2010. Digital C-print, 130 x 100 cm, edition of 8 © Denis Darzacq

‘Faces Now’ is the first exhibition that looks back on the interesting developments, which European portrait photography has experienced since 1989. It brings together the work of 32 photographers and visual artists who in the past 25 years have been decisive figures in innovation in the realm of European portrait photography. Alongside big names such as Anton Corbijn, Rineke Dijkstra, Boris Mikhailov, Thomas Ruff, Juergen Teller and Sergey Bratkov, less well known – but influential – photographers are also part of the selection. The exhibition demonstrates the power, wealth and diversity of contemporary European photography and makes links with the Renaissance tradition – the origin of the portrait genre.

One of the most poignant photographs in the exhibition is the death portrait of Belgian art curator Jan Hoet, made by Stephan Vanfleteren. Post-mortem photography, the practice of photographing the recently deceased, was a normal part of American and European culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Today, the practice is rare. With this portrait Vanfleteren places himself within the tradition of the vanitas, especially associated with still life painting in Flanders and the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th century. In a television interview Vanfleteren remarks revealingly: “I often feel more kinship with the classical painters of 300 years ago than with my contemporary colleagues.”

© Beat Streuli, Bruxelles 05/06, 2007, C-print, 125 x 175 cm Courtesy the artist and Galerie Conrads, Dusseldorf

‘Faces Now’ scrutinises the stratified and diverse identity of European citizens. The curators chose 1990 as a benchmark because the year signalled the start of a trend in the portrait genre whereby the individual – famous or anonymous – and his or her social and cultural identity occupies centre stage. “In the 90s, we saw a rising number of photographers turning their objective towards the everyday citizen and devote artistic portraits to ‘ordinary’ people in the style of those usually traditionally reserved for the powerful, with a kind of humanist expression.” This includes the likes of Beat Streuli and Luc Delahaye who photograph people on the street without their knowledge. “I see an interesting parallel with the Renaissance, when consideration for the individual reappeared in society. This focus on the individual is clearly visible in ‘Faces Then’,” explains Frits Gierstberg, curator of ‘Faces Now’, in Agenda Magazine.

© Sergey Bratkov, Sonya, from the series ‘KIDS’, 2000, Colour photo, 40 x 27 cm, Courtesy Regina Gallery

Spread over seven halls and as much themes, the exhibition zooms in on opposites such as private versus public, formal versus informal and tradition and renewal.  It’s an interesting way of grouping and confronting very different series of portraits. It is also a pleasant rediscovery of the work of famous photographers and that of lesser-known names.

© Luc Delahaye, Untitled, – from the series ‘L’autre’, 1995-1997, Gelatin silver print, 22 cm x 16,8 cm, Courtesy the artist & Galerie (above right)

© Riet Breukel (‘Mother’), Amsterdam, 1997. © Koos Breukel (under left)

Selected photographers include: Tina Barney, Sergey Bratkov, Koos Breukel, Clegg & Guttmann, Anton Corbijn, Christian Courrèges, Denis Darzacq, Luc Delahaye, Rineke Dijkstra, Jitka Hanzlová, Konstantinos Ignatiadis, Alberto García-Alix, Stratos Kalafatis, Boris Mikhailov, Nikos Markou, Hellen van Meene, Jorge Molder, Lucia Nimcova, Adam Pańczuk, Dita Pepe, Anders Petersen, Paola De Pietri, Jorma Puranen, Thomas Ruff, Clare Strand, Beat Streuli, Thomas Struth, Juergen Teller, Ari Versluis & Ellie Uyttenbroek, Stephan Vanfleteren and Manfred Willmann.

INFO
Bozar, Brussel
06.02.2015 - 17.05.2015

© BOZAR | urbanautica Belgium

EXHIBITION
Camera Austria, Graz
12.03.2015 - 06.09.2015

Landscapes are never simply there. Landscapes are always an expression of relationships. Landscape is a social covenant, a convention. In this nexus of relations and conventions, photographs play a central role. If landscape always represents a combination of aesthetic, social, economic, symbolic, and spatial elements, and photography “serves as a kind of relay connecting theories of art, language, and the mind with conceptions of social, cultural, and political value” (W. J. T. Mitchell), then a complex articulation of culture arises at the junction between landscape and photography: both associate that history with this view, that text with this identity, that memory with this place, that place with this history. Both landscape and photography embody a space where differences are yielded; both are linked to identity, memory, knowledge, history, and experience and provide a stage for related inscriptions.

© Eröffnung / Opening, 12.3.2015 Camera Austria 2015. Photo: Joana Theuer

Against this backdrop, the exhibition series “Disputed Landscape” queries current photographic positions as to how they convey or make visible these articulations in pictures. Some of the invited artists work in areas that are or have been marked by military or national conflict, ranging from Tibet to the Middle East, from Africa to Ireland, with an aim to expose their forensic and symbolic traces (“Uncovering History”); others explore the fiction of landscape, historical photographic dispositifs, or the documentary conflict with a view to representation (“The Visual Paradigm”); and still others focus on the temporal, spatial, corporeal, and pictorial constructions of landscape (“Enacting Landscape”). Common to all projects appears to be the fact that the photographs produced in the process are themselves permeated by conflicts and ruptures, that they challenge existing articulations of those ideologies by way of these representations. Is it even possible to reconstruct (conflicting) histories like those inscribed in landscapes? And if so, in which ways? How are these histories staged in image form, themselves being characterised by the suppression of visibility, a suppression that is so often compounded and ingrained by a suppression of (other) histories? Which facets of historical formations can be exposed, which aspects of things and words, vision and speech, content and expression? Against this background, the exhibition project opens up an arena for coming to terms with articulations, a pursuit that ultimately infuses all of the pictures themselves.

THE VISUAL PARADIGM
13.03.2015 - 10.05.2015

Stephanie Kiwitt
In her project “Wondelgemse Meersen” (2012), Stephanie Kiwitt (born 1972 in Bonn, lives in Brussels) photographed a wasteland to the north of the Belgian city of Ghent. The area, which encompasses around 100 hectares, was originally a marshland and is today surrounded by transport routes, commercial and housing zones, and empty industrial buildings. Kiwitt meticulously documents this semi-urban area through countless photographs, which in the eponymous book are generally arranged in grids and are only occasionally interrupted by full-page spreads. The images feature an untold number of details, yet without ever providing an overview of the landscape itself. It seems to be a way of visually probing, testing, exploring—culture and nature collide in the seemingly cut-out pictures, with allusions to various utilisations, though only fragmentary and without context. The area itself remains inaccessible and unidentified, showing how the artist impressively documents the actual limits of documentation.

Christian Mayer
In a piece from the year 2011, Christian Mayer (born 1976 in Sigmaringen, lives in Vienna) thematises the story of a National Geographic Society expedition that took place in Basin State Park, Utah, in 1949: “Escalante Expedition Named This Glowing Valley ‘Koda-chrome Flat’”. Image panels freely positioned in space or leaned against the wall display enlarged original photographs and the related captions, translating a certain history of seeing and its photographic representation into an installative arrangement that lends emphasis to the artificiality of the endeavour. With this group of works, Mayer makes clear that the perception of landscape is very closely connected to the cultural techniques of recording, representing, processing, and also archiving it. As such, vision itself has a history and is linked to specific materialities. Mayer brings up to date imaging technology that is no longer available: the production of the Kodak colour film that in the 1940s gave photography its new role as the guiding visual medium was stopped in 2011. This allows the artist to highlight those aspects and methods that are determinative for the visualisation and archivisation of reality, and especially of landscape.

© Christian Mayer, Escalante Expedition Named This Glowing Valley
‘Kodachrome Flat’, 2011

Ricarda Roggan
The work of Ricarda Roggan (born 1972 in Dresden, lives in Leipzig) is characterised by a fundamental control of the photographic image. It determines, through complex arrangements, the way in which we are able to see something. Yet the term intervention better lends itself to describing this working approach than the term staging. This method is even continued when encountering nature and landscape. In the series “Baumstücke” (Treescape, since 2007), the artist prunes the foliage and branches of the depicted tree groups until they meet her own visual specifications. For the series “Sedimente” (Sediments, since 2008), photographed in rock quarries, she rearranges the strata of rock in the foreground. Eliminated in the process are dramatic or attention-drawing details in particular. This gives rise to impermeable disclosures, just as exemplary as they are enigmatic and placeless. Contrasting approaches like documentation and construction, reality and model, which attain clarity through their methods, likewise underscore the power of defining the visual through the perception of landscape.

© Ricarda Roggan, natura nova, Sedimente 6, 2010. Courtesy: Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin.

Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch
In many of their series, Nicole Six and Paul Petritsch (born 1971 in Vöcklabruck and 1968 in Friesach, live in Vienna) engage with the modern paradigm of discovering and surveying the world. They translate the spatial aspects of these conquests into systems of representation that are characterised by conceptual methods, thus placing them in a relationship of tension with the (photographic) image. In the series “Die Innere Grenze/Notranja meja” (The Inner Border, 2008), the artists use historical maps to help them trace the former border between Austria and the “SHS State” (Kingdom of Serbs, Croatians, and Slovenes), which made a claim to parts of what is today Carinthia after the First World War. In 1920, approximately 60 per cent of the population living there voted through a national referendum to remain Austrian. Created according to a predefined cartographic grid, pictures of seventy-four sites show the various landscapes along this historical boundary line. Questions pertaining to the possibilities of reconstruction and documentation are associated with questions of the political meaning of landscape.

UNCOVERING HISTORY
16.05.2015 – 05.07.2015

Anthony Haughey
Anthony Haughey’s series “Disputed Territory” (since 2006) investigates on a long term European territorial and identitarian tensions based on the ramifications of the conflicts in Ireland, Bosnia, and Cosovo. The artist, who resides in Ireland, spent several years living near the border separating Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. At the height of the so-called “Northern Ireland conflict” in the 1970s and 1980s, it was one of the most monitored and militarized zones outside of the former Eastern bloc—however, this line of demarcation remained largely invisible. Haughey’s photographs at times portray strange environments of unclear use, displaying traces that often elude identification. Many of the markings, objects, and interventions remain unintelligible and necessitate a precise and complex approach to interpretation. It is the actual attempt to decipher this meaning that first politicises these landscapes as contested territories. Yet the suppression, forgetting, and remembering of this deciphering are not neutral or innocent acts—so in this sense the pictures plainly show something that corresponds to the discomfort of memory and history, along with the attempt to counteract the disappearance of such memory and history.

© Anthony Haughey, Plantation, Armagh / Louth Border, aus der Serie / from the series: Disputed Territory, 2006

Tatiana Lecomte
Tatiana Lecomte (born 1971 in Bordeaux, lives in Vienna) found a private slide archive in a rubbish bin near her home. It always shows—apparently spanning several decades—the same woman, usually in erotic poses, at diverse “showplaces” throughout the world. In “Die El Alamein-Stellung. Eine Montage” (Positions at El Alamein. A Montage, 2012), the artist takes pictures from this archive that were shot along the beach of El Alamein, which was the beach that in 1942 became a part of a war zone, where the Allied Forces forced the German-Italian troops from Africa to retreat after two decisive battles, and combines them with military archive photos: soldiers, burning vehicles, map material, aeroplanes, troop movements. The two image sources are intervolved, ultimately becoming indistinguishable. Since each slide features part of the artist’s hand, which shows us the images against a green background, this indistinguishability is subverted by a moment of authenticity. Indeed, an artificially construed history of war and private obsession is woven into a landscape that has become a stage for both private and historical storylines at the same time, redoubling within this ambivalence the ambivalence of photographic documentation.

Jo Ractliffe
“Sometimes I’m not even sure what it is I’m looking at. I am here without language. It is hard to read the signs.” Between 2007 and 2010, Jo Ractliffe journeyed to the south of Angola a number of times, looking for vestiges of the Namibian War of Independence. She travelled with former soldiers who were revisiting, for the first time since achieving independence in 1990, places they had fought. They almost did not recognise the sites. The mines make it nearly impossible for people to resettle there. They also visited Cassinga, where the South African army attacked a SWAPO base in 1978, killing numerous civilians in the process. Ractliffe’s photographs attest to the silence and desolation of the landscape. Her pictures, which sometimes have a spectral air about them, revolve around the idea of a “landscape as pathology” in the sense that past violence—enduring and transient, visible and invisible—becomes inscribed in the present, both forensically and symbolically. This pathology, through which such violent history haunts the present, compels us to engage with those sites that almost totally elude understanding today, for which we still cannot find a language or even pictures.

© Jo Ractliffe, aus der Serie / from the series: As Terras do Fim do Mundo,
2009-10. Courtesy: Stevenson, Cape Town

Ahlam Shibli
The images of “The Valley” were taken in 2007 in the village Arab al-Shibli and its lands in the Lower Galilee of Palestine/Israel. In this work Ahlam Shibli reads the landscape and the marks it bears against the backdrop of the village’s history.
Half the inhabitants of the village Arab al-Sbaih survived the war of 1948 by hiding in caves of Mt. Tabor, the mountain on whose flanks the village had been built. The other half of the people opposed the Jewish fighters, to protect their lands, and as a consequence had to seek refuge in Jordan. In the camps the refugees kept the memory of their original home by using the old names and reproducing the previous social structure. The refugeesʼ living conditions are the subject of Shibliʼs work “Arab al-Sbaih”.
When the people who had been hiding at the mountain returned to their property after the war they were forced to change the name of their village in order to avoid revenge from the victors. They renamed the village Arab al-Shibli.
“The Valley” shows the way the people from Arab al-Shibli are presently forced to scar the mountain that had protected them during the war. In order to be able to build a house they had to give up the name of their village and the respect for the land. While they were deprived of their sense of home, the refugees in the camps in Jordan kept a sense of home, but are without proper houses.

Efrat Shvili
In her series “100 Years” (2007), Efrat Shvili presents close-up photos of trees and thickets, without a horizon and eluding any possible orientation. The nearly graphic surface of the photographs shields us from these placeless spaces that appear to be reserved solely for nature. Yet, as many of her earlier works, this series revolves around the special political situation in Israel. “100 Years” shows a forest in the west of Jerusalem, planted one hundred years ago by the Jewish National Fund as part of a reforestation programme in Palestine. What today appears to be nature and indigenous forest was actually planted on former Palestinian land with the aim of edging out the population there. The beauty and texture of the images is suggestive of a naturalness that stands in contrast to the artificiality and political “nature” of this forest. It turns the images into metaphors of a strategy for usurping landscape, for suppressing history and making it invisible, a history that is always that of others, the others—thus likewise turning the pictures into a political metaphor.

© Eröffnung / Opening, 12.3.2015 Camera Austria 2015. Photo: Joana Theuer

ENACTING LANDSCAPE
11.07.2015 - 06.09.2015

Philip Gaißer
The saguaro cactus stands like a monument embedded in a stony, overgrown bit of desert landscape, towering towards the sky between two boulders. It is flanked from the rear by karstic hills that delineate a jagged horizon against light clouds. The almost clichéd sense of familiarity mingles with irritation, for the trunk and lateral branches of this particular Carnegiea gigantea have been amputated at what looks to be halfway up. The cut surfaces precisely coincide with the transition between background and sky, instinctively giving rise to a montage or even an intervention on the object by the photographer. It is a picture with a sober yet enigmatic title,
“Made by Cactus Tactical Supply” (2013), fielding an open-ended question as to what may have come to pass here: the intriguing congruence between figure and background inserts an artistic moment into the nature photograph and narrates the landscape as a construction. This is a move that is characteristic of Philip Gaißer’s photography, even if themes and subjects tend to vary. Despite all of the documentary-fostering soberness, his images retain their sense of mystery. There is always an off-balance moment or a focused ambivalence—scenographic gestures that Gaißer uses to channel an irritation into the immediacy of the given photographic circumstance, and to open and mould the view to the landscape.

© Philip Gaißer, Made by Cactus Tactical Supply, aus der Serie / from the series: The Ground is Mine the Sky is Yours, 2013. Courtesy: Galerie Conradi, Hamburg

Michael Höpfner
Michael Höpfner’s work is founded on travel, usually to remote areas devoid of people like the elevated Chang Tang plateau in Tibet in his current piece “Lay Down, Stand Up, Walk On” (2014/15). The focus here is on the rhythm of movement in relation to places in a placeless landscape. Höpfner takes a picture, walks a few steps further, takes another picture, repeating this process four to five times. A sequence arises that documents the movement rather than primarily the landscape itself. Such sequences give rise to a kind of (re-)presentation of the landscape, which is based on the “performance” of walking, halting, pausing briefly, and then continuing to walk. Yet at the centre of this performative documentation is a conflict, namely, between the utterly different conceptions of places and spaces within the culture of the Tibetan highlands and that of post-postmodern consumer society. Here the East stands for a realm of promise and primitiveness, but also of mystery and barbarity, of menace by that which cannot be controlled. The landscapes through which Höpfner perambulates appear to be natural space, but they are in fact a discursively spawned space—by the West—that may be localisable but at the same time remains a ubiquitous threat.

© Sharon Ya’ari, Agave, Hadera, 2012. Courtesy: Sommer Contemporary Tel Aviv

Sharon Ya’ari
Sharon Ya’ari (born 1966 in Israel, lives in Tel Aviv) is especially interested in the ways in which history becomes inscribed in places. In Israel, such history particularly relates to the appropriation of land, with utopias of landscape and society brought into the country by its many immigrants, who attempted—against all odds—to realise them there. Perhaps it is for this reason that many of Ya’ari’s photographs seem curiously out of place, as if artificially arranged, and certainly unclear in terms of meaning. The artist has visited some sites and landscapes at intervals of several years so as to document the—sometimes veritably uncanny—blend of stagnation and decline, custody and neglect, nature and culture, remembrance and forgetting. Here Ya’ari is not primarily concerned with the documentable shifts, but rather with a possible analogy for future changes, not least because, as he himself notes, it may be possible to foretell the next catastrophe. Accordingly, these images appear less as documentation than as a probing of the meaning of the places and landscapes, as relates to the production of identity and belonging, not only in terms of the present day, but also the imminent, uncertain future.

© Camera Austria | urbanautica

BY STEVE BISSON

As with the previous edition we are glad to be media partners of Format Festival. Hereby some of our selected ‘evidences.

NICOLÓ DEGIORGIS: HIDDEN ISLAM

From the introduction by Martin Parr: «”Consider these facts. In Italy the right to worship, without discrimination, is enshrined within the constitution. There are 1.35 million Muslims in Italy and yet, officially, only eight mosques in the whole country. One consequence is that the Muslim population have accumulated a huge number of makeshift and temporary places of worship. These are housed in a variety of buildings including lock ups, garages, shops, warehouses and old factories. This shortage of places to worship is particularly acute in north east Italy – where the photographer Nicolò Degiorgis lives – home to many anti-Islamic campaigns headed by the right wing party Lega Nord. The dull images of the many and diverse buildings that house the makeshift mosques are printed on folded pages. You open up the gatefold to reveal the scenes inside the mosques, shot in full colour. The size of the gatherings varies, from large crowds who sometimes pray outside to a small room full to bursting, or to intimate groups of two or three Muslims. Nicolò Degiorgis provides a fascinating glimpse of hidden world and leaves the conclusions about this project entirely in our own hands.»

© Nicolò Degiorgis, ‘Hidden Islam’

…

NAE: RESIDUAL: TRACES OF THE BLACK BODY

Developed as part of FORMAT International Photography Festival 2015, ‘Residual: Traces of the Black Body’ looks at the process of imaging the black presence in relation to memory and erasure. ‘Residual’ refers to the idea of what remains after the main visual or tangible part of something has been removed or has disappeared. The focus of this exhibition lies more precisely on traces and stories around the black body through the multidisciplinary approaches of a cross-generational and cross-cultural group of five international visual artists and photographers. Bringing together Larry Achiampong (UK), Cristiano Berti (Italy), George Hallett (South Africa), Zanele Muholi (South Africa), and Ingrid Pollard (UK), the project examines how each of those artists apprehends black corporeality, in such manner that both its materiality and embodied narratives are either visually or conceptually concealed, codified and complexified.

The works selected include Self Evident (1995) by Ingrid Pollard, a series of light boxes presenting colourful and picturesque full-length portraits taken in British landscapes, with each person holding a symbolic item that often evokes Britain’s colonial history.

Larry Achiampong’s Glyth series (2013) consists of family photographs reworked with the faces being replaced by black circles with sharp red lips. Through the “mask”, the hidden and performed identities transpose on a personal photographic archive a symbol schematising the racial experience of figures perceived as alien.

Zanele Muholi’s photographs She’ll, Umthombo and Dis-ease (2012) show a different aspect to her upfront visual activism. Trading her portraits and intimate scenes of the black South African LGBTI community, this series uses metaphors to depict the physiological patterns and aftermath of hate crimes committed against black lesbians. Each organic element evokes female and male private parts, and diseased cells.

Cristiano Berti challenges the voyeurism and spectacle that often characterise Western gaze on the black female body. His sound piece Happy (2004) invites the audience to an imaginary mapping of a body which scars are related in Edo, a Nigerian language. Likewise Iye Omoge (2005), an installation consisting of site photographs, polypropylene maps and sound, articulates a compelling relationship between location and morphology in a context of migration and marginalisation.

Finally the pictures taken by George Hallett in District Six and Bo-Kaap, Cape Town, in the late 1960s, mark the first traces of textual inscriptions in his work. These rare photographic inscriptions are tags mapping gang territories. They also contribute to convey the physicality of places that have been erased by the Apartheid regime. They are visual remnants of a lifestyle, culture and coding related to a marginalised existence then imposed on black bodies.

Curated by Christine Eyene, Residual: Traces of the Black Body responds to the theme of FORMAT FESTIVAL 2015: Evidence, and aims to take on a dialectical approach to the notion of photographic evidence through engaging with the dual positioning of discourse and counter-discourse in the field of black visual representation. Alongside the exhibition is planned a public programme consisting of an artists and curator’s talk and a photography workshop.

…

EXCEPT THE MIRROR. CURATED BY MELANIE STIDOLPH

Artists: Sophie Clements, Annie MacDonell, Tom Lovelace, Richard Paul, Melanie Stidolph, Alice Walton. Except the Mirror is a group show that explores the movement and positioning of objects and found images in relationship to an evidencing and externalizing of artists’ thought. The artists are included in terms of what they reveal and offer around a making process that is engaged with a long-term fascination with forms of representation.

Alice Walton’s work provides a central sculptural pivot to the exhibition with the repeated act of a precise editing and positioning of found images.  Tom Lovelace’s stilled performances for the camera reveal excerpts from a line of thinking through action. Sophie Clement’s video work joins the poetic randomness of objects in motion with a science of capture. The free fall and solidity of the work, enhanced through the sound track, creates a balance between intentionality and chance, harnessed by the artist.

Melanie Stidolph’s video and photographs use objects and the voice to trigger the camera.  The repeatedly appearing coloured balls are evidence of a certain exhaustion of ideas, a process of trial and error in search of a response; a visual appearance that mirrors an internal thought process.  Richard Paul and Annie MacDonell’s work plays with the precise nature of the photographic studio using the symbolism of ordinary objects and archival images. These are employed in an enquiry around images as evidence, through heightened attention to the devices of photographic appearance and representation.  

© Richard Paul

…

HOW TO HUMILIATE AND SHAME: THE POWER OF THE MUG SHOT

Mug shots are enduring, powerful, familiar and universal images seen today in newspapers, on TV and of course, on digital screens. The press have long since been fascinated and intrigued by the standard head and shoulder poses which emerged over a century and a half ago and still exist today; tabloids in the US especially, devour celebrities to extremes.

It’s hard to imagine a criminal justice system today without mug shots. But the so-called ‘judicial photograph’ emerged from mid 19th century photography during the Victorian era of experiments, and portraits began to be standardised into ‘mug shots.’ At that time, the sitters were mostly well dressed and posed seated, co-opting the language of painting, and as a result, carried a painterliness in their prints while the photographer expressed the criminals’ characteristics.

An example of this can be seen in a series of prints belonging to the owner of Derby Gaol, Richard Felix, by photographer William Garbutt of daguerreotypes that are part of a display for FORMAT in Derby Gaol, in conjunction with Derby Police Museum.

…

NICK SARGEANT: THE ALBUM

Born and educated in Derby much of Sargeant’s photographic work has explored ideas of memory and identity. Sergeant has been drawn back to his earliest images to re-examine the subjects. The images are taken in the 1960s in Derby and across Derbyshire.

At the age of 11, Sargeant was given a camera. On his first roll of film he photographed classmates at Junior School. Shortly afterwards he moved on to a new school and ceased to see any of his mates again. This first roll of film remains as the only evidence of friendships the artist once had.

In the years following, Sargeant obsessively photographed family and friends. His grandparents died one by one and the family group shrank. In 1971 Sargeant’s parents separated and sadly in 1974 his mother died. Two years later his father followed the same fate.

The photographs from those years trigger memories for Sargeant. Using the photographs objectively the artist has attempted to find evidence of what went wrong in his family. From this he begins to question his history ‘were his parents ever happy?’ ‘Was he and his brother?’ ‘What was the role of his grandparents?’

The artist’s brother inevitably features in many of the images, often with some form of toy gun that Sargeant claims he has never seen before. Ostensibly the photographs are fairly conventional family snapshots but to the artist there is an underlying sense of unease.

© Nick Sargeant

…

PICKFORD’S HOUSE: THE PHOTOGRAPH IS PROOF

‘The Photograph is Proof’. Mumbai based curator Anusha Yadav from the Indian Memory Project presents The Photograph is Proof, a historical representation of criminal investigations in India; a rare opportunity to see visual evidence records outside their legal usage.

The visual records on display re-look at a few cases where photographic evidence or the lack of it, lent itself for an objective understanding of the situation, or means to an end, including some meant for entertainment and illicit thrills. Yet they are a visual rhetoric and a representation of crime and narratives from a largely undocumented and diverse subcontinent.

The Memory Company was founded by Anusha Yadav, Photographer and Designer of the Indian Memory Project. Founded in 2010, it is an online, curated, visual and oral-history based archive that traces a personal history of the Indian Subcontinent, its people, cultures, professions, cities, development, traditions, circumstances and their consequences. Applying images, letters and stories from family archives (sent and collected from contributors), it reconstructs a visual history that is emotionally rich, vivid, informative and even more surprising than we think.

© Indian Memory Project

…

© Format Festival

BY DIETER DEBRUYNE

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

I always loved to look at the small family photo album that my grandfather made. Tiny black and white prints, with lots of snapshots but also those images that wanted to make you believe that they lived in a huge villa and had a nice car, by posing in front of it, even it wasn’t theirs. After some years I understood that even my grandfathers photographs betrayed me and that it was all set up by the photographer, my grandfather himself. 

When I was 17 I started to study Photography at the art academy of Gent. To get a place at the academy, we all had to do an entry exam where they asked us what we knew about photography and photographers. My answer was: “Nothing. I came here to study that.” Unbelievable but true… they let me in. I think it was my strength to not have that trained eye and to not feel the weight of all the visual information that can direct one in a certain direction, without first discovering for her- himself. Once started my studies, my first task was ‘light’. I took a photo of our dog, in the dark, in the snow. I still like that image. It’s so naive and therefore beautiful I think.

© Griet Van de Velde, Flower on Table, 1999

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

Some pupils open up during their art studies and others start to feel limited. I was one of the last ones. After 2 years I stopped my day time studies and continued in evening school, where I could use the studio and dark room. In general we were very free to choose what we wanted to do.
After those studies and working a bit too much at the studio, where you can ‘control’ the image, I really wanted to go back to my very first approach of an untrained eye. See it as an adult trying to draw like a child. That was the difficult part. 

I bought myself an Olympus compact camera and started to shoot in color. The things around me, daily ordinary things, like my very first shots in black and white. I wanted to get rid of the limitation of working in ‘series’. To get surprised again by a moment of light and shadows that turns ordinary things into poetry or fascinating ordinary installations, made (un)-consciously by the human kind.
The beauty of the position of a waterfall painting next to a cheap hostel room door, with sofa. As it was all made up to get intrigued by what maybe could happen or just happened behind the wall. The moment that the shadow of a tree is projected on a party tent, waiting for her visitors to enter. Those are just two examples of capturing the ‘moment’ on my way, instead of hunting for it. I prefer not hunting for a date, but rather to meet him/her on my way. I learnt that I personally get limited when working in series. It has blocked me for years and doesn’t work for me. So I went back to those early days of my naive eye, but trained by the time and many interesting visual dialogues.

© Griet Van de Velde, Snooker, 2001

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

I mentioned before the album of my grandfather. People took photography quite seriously. A portrait was a serious thing that needed time. Lately we’ve been seeing lots of snapshots, shared by social media. Not too much time taken to ‘make’ them, neither ‘share’ them. It’s a wild jungle of images. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I like to find peace in photographs. Even in my own photographs I see this more and more.

Good photography will always survive in the jungle. That photography is maybe seen as an under appreciated art medium, is a fact. There’re lots of good and interesting images ‘accidently’ taken, by untrained eyes. So it seems easy and therefore not taken seriously. Instagram gave us even some filters for free, to give an artistic look to our ordinary snapshots. Suddenly we all became artistic photographers. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Bad thing is that photographs are too much seen on screens. It’s still important, as it is with painting, to see the final product, the print, the frame, the way a photograph is installed, …

© Installation view Griet Van de Velde

Good thing is that it is much easier now to share your work. While before the social media, one was depending on people who wanted to show his/her work and gave him/her a chance. Urbanautica is an example.

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

As I mentioned before, my personal research is to stay close to myself. Of course we are all children of our time and we will always be. For me the practice is the research. When I revisit my first photographs and go to my recent ones, I see a naturally grown line, in revealing and concealing, shadows and light on the ordinary, the peace and the claustrophobic directed by my image editing, …

I want that the subject come to me. My initial concern is the photograph, the instance. Too much thinking would lose the naive viewpoint. Planning would go against that.

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

As I’m not hunting for images, I need my camera always with me. So I prefer a rather small one, but not compact. I like to control the diaphragm manually.

© Griet Van de Velde, Tree in Tent 2014

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

When I started in late 90’s with my little camera, I discovered the work of Jitka Hanzlova. Her sweet touch to capture the beauty of the simple things in life, her life. The beauty of the village where she was born, but also the beauty of nature in her recent work. The poetry of dawn in the grass she captures, is exceptional for me.  

There are two persons that influenced me in the ability to show. One is my boyfriend, painter Carlos Caballero, who insisted that I finally come out with my photos. He gave my work visibility when helping me with my website. This is important these days. Especially when you just start to show works. The other person, is my friend minimal artist Wilfredo Prieto, who convinced me to finally exhibit my work. He selected, together with art historian Lena Solà Nogué, and showed 35 photographs during their stay in Belgium. Their selection of my photographs also helped me to approach my work in a different, more purified way. It was the first time, after all those years of taking photos in silence that my photographs were shown, summer 2014.

7. Three books of photography that you recommend?

I am not the right person to recommend books of photography. There are so many photographers, and so many good ones that I can’t know all of them… Not every photographer has had the luck that a nice catalogue was published and was distributed widely. Off course we all know the catalogues of the most famous one, Nan Goldin, William Eggleston, Diane Arbus, Joel Sternfeld… and I very much like to look at them.

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

A few years ago I saw the solo show of Wolfgang Tillmans in Hamburger Bahnhoff in Berlin. A fresh, inspiring show it was. The way his photographs were represented. Open to experiment and to make your own puzzle out of his photographs. I had the feeling I could make different selections from his choices and make my own selection of his work. I just don’t know if he would like that.

© Installation view Griet Van de Velde

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

I’ll continue my own way, as I said before. But if one day a serie grows naturally, out of a place I stay or people I meet, then a serie it will be.

Concerning showing my work, I can announce that a photograph of mine was chosen for ‘Guest Room: Katrin Weber – Der Greif’ and will be on show for 1 month at Galerie f5,6 in Munich. In May a selection of 5 big prints will be on show at the art gallery EL. My photographs will be shown together with the work of 5 visual artists. A few weeks ago I received the great news from curator Angel Calvo that they invite me for a solo show at art space Miramemira in Santiago de Compostela, opening on June 25th 2015. In July I’ll participate in the Second Room project in Ghent, where they asked me as a curator – artist. I invited 2 young upcoming artists, medium video and installation, to show their work with mine. I am also invited for the Fotorama Window Project, opening end of August. It is a project organized by 2 art collectors and professional printers.

More is coming up, such as a group show with established and upcoming artists, living in Ghent. There is interest in my work in Cuba as well. For the moment, it’s still too early to talk about this. As I mentioned before, I just started to show since summer 2014. It’s all quite new for me and one needs time.

10. How do you see the future of photography in general evolve?

Digital photography made it easy or easier to work with photographs. Lots of our ordinary photos don’t even get printed anymore. Most photographs are mostly seen on screens. You can take as many as you want and choose the best one. It doesn’t cost you more. There’s no time lost for waiting to see the results. A mistake can be corrected in a moment. 

Lately I see a reaction on ‘the fast’ aspect. There is a fresh wind of photographers that went back to the old school - analogue way of capturing and representing. The romance of the dark room is back. To play in the dark room, creating graduates on the paper and so on… Now it’s even fashionable to print on paper again, raw paper. So it all looks a bit more artistic again. In the arts it will be always like this, reaction on the previous wave and action in creating a new one. There was barite paper, plastic photo paper, light boxes, screens and now we go back to the barite paper.

© Griet Van de Velde, Horse Rest, 2015

11. When I look at your first pics and the more recent; I see an evolution. More sterile pics, can you comment? 

You see them as more sterile. I see them as cleaner, maybe more purified, but not sterile. For me there is still the feeling of ‘the abandoned’ and ‘the melancholic’. The type of camera that one uses is off course influencing. My older photographs were taken on film, with that small Olympus camera. Now I’m working with a digital camera and yes I can control more.

12. During our talk you mentioned you like proofings and just common photo paper? Why? And what is the value to your work? 

In the 90’s I always made little proofings of my films. I liked that format a lot, because I could see the photos better than on contact prints. As I was photographing in silence for many years and I never showed my work, I had most of my photographs only on proofings, at home. The day that I was invited for my first show, I liked the idea of showing my proofing formats as I only had seen my photographs in that format for such a long time. In general I love small formats, because it challenges you to go closer and look differently. It sucks you into the image. If you are willing to… 

I like common photo paper, because of the same reason I guess. The ordinary. The small. The ones we always had at home. The paper my holiday and friends were represented on. I don’t want to play with ‘the romantic’, by the print. It is already in my photographs. It would be too much of the same and I prefer the contrast.

© Griet Van de Velde, Beach Fence, 2015

13. In your prof career (read S.M.A.K.) you meet a lot of different contemporay artists. Some info on your job? And does this restrict you in any way?

I indeed work for the museum for contemporary art in Gent. My work is organizing art activities for the members of the museum and yes I meet lots of artists at their studio. I’m working between the viewers, creators, collectors and sellers. I’ve been traveling a lot and organizing lots of art travels, in and out of Europe. I’ve had the chance to have interesting conversations with different kinds of artists. My job is not a restriction at all. I love it. I see things differently and can have a better overview than before. There are so many ways and waves and it is all so subjective. It’s a pity that photography is still a bit apart from the contemporary art scene, although it depends on the country.
In Belgium it’s maybe a bit difficult for me to show, as most people know me from the museum. As it is hard for most people to think ‘out of the box’, they have some problems when approaching a photographer. They see me as ‘Griet from the S.M.A.K. museum’, doing photography as her hobby. I don’t understand that way of thinking. If we think of Vivian Maier, being a nanny and taking photos in silence. Was she a photographer or a nanny? That’s not the question anymore. Being a nanny, she maybe felt the freedom of doing what she wanted, without pressure.

© Griet Van de Velde | urbanautica Belgium

AN EXHIBITION BY CAO GUIMARÃES

Cao Guimarães just turned 50 last January. The date and a new book on his work from publisher Cosac Naify have motivated the artist from Minas Gerais, Brazil to cast an eye on his past works, especially the leftovers, the ones that didn’t make it into his official pieces. The outcome of this retrospective look is 5th solo show at the Galeria Nara Roesler headquarters in São Paulo from April 07 to June 06, 2015. The book, titled Cao, will be launched during the exhibition opening.

© Cao Guimarães, Ilhas, 2015

The starting point for the exhibition was the Ilhas (Islands) series (previously called Úmido, or Moist), comprising four photos of plants on the floor with moisture halos from past rains around them. It’s a good synthesis for the imagery the exhibit conjures: that which remains, which stays after something or someone is gone. “It’s the memory of the gesture, the remnant, what remains. They’re nuances of what happened in that place,” says the artist. Of all the works in the exhibit, the Ilhas series is the only one that was ever shown. But not in Brazil: the photos were on display in the latest edition of Miami Art Basel (checar).

Four other sets of photos will take up the anterior part of the annex space at Galeria Nara Roesler in São Paulo, all alluding to the floor, and all featuring signs of human presence that is no more. They also share a heavily graphic character, a meeting with an unforeseen beauty.

“I found many of these materials lying among scraps of films, of photos that I gathered throughout my career. It’s a sign of the times: since I work in audiovisual, I cast aside stuff that I don’t include in my works. On seeing them again, I realized that they carried an aesthetical intention, a gaze that, albeit somewhat unconsciously, paid attention to a formal identity, to the beauty of images.”

Works created especially for the exhibition include the Steps series, composed of 14 B&W photographs of the footprints of construction workers. The pictures were printed on a black tarp, which was also used to hold lime dust released by wall sanding. The contrast between the white dust and the black background shows what would otherwise be imperceptible: the action of men through their steps and gestures.

© Cao Guimarães, Sonho de bebê, 2015

Another series, this one untitled, shows a pattern that resembles lace, a piece of fabric, formed by numerous footprints of birds on the dark sand of a beach. The series contains four photographs that were part of Guimarães’ archives, as were the three photos in another untitled series whose shared formal characteristic is the sinuosity of the elements they portray: the tracks left by a slug, the reflection of a thin strand of water seen on a puddle on dirt, and a pubic hair on a parquet floor.

Yet another set of archives is the Sonho de Bebê (Baby’s Dream) series, a quadriptych of Super 8 stills showing aerial sights of the São Francisco River. Through the poor image definition stemming from the grainy film, as opposed to the cold sharpness of digital media, Cao Guimarães drew a parallel with the shapes that possibly populate the imaginations of babies, still devoid of fixed images of the things of the world.

This quality of perspective and the grainy quality of Super 8, with its retro-like visuality, also provides the ambience for the video that will be shown in the back of the annex room. Two images alternate in an endless loop, with subtle changes in color and pace: the shadow of a woman’s hair on the wall, and the ebb and flow of waves seen from above. “What gets accentuated here is the wavelike relationship between the hair and the ocean,” the artist explains.

For this exhibition, Cao Guimarães, a filmmaker and visual artist, surrounds himself with the surfaces that beings record their existence on, unbeknownst to them. “The floor and wall are, par excellence, the apparatuses with which to record human presence.” In the formal similitudes between different testimonies of absence, he finds the beauty that gives new dimension to small gestures and commonplace events. His take on life values the minutest instants, aware as he is that time constitutes itself from ephemerality.

© Cao Guimarães, Steps, 2015

The works of Cao Guimarães are expanded audiovisual pieces that often straddle the line that separates film and the visual arts. He also works with photography, a case in point being his ongoing Gambiarras series. Here, his improvisational abilities create moments of quirkiness that can reinvent our gaze upon objects and run-of-the-mill situations. Guimarães was born in 1965 in Belo Horizonte, where he lives and works. He has been featured in the 25th and 27th editions of the São Paulo Art Biennial, Brazil (2002 and 2006); the 8th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2011); the 6th Biennale de Montreal in Canada (2009); and the Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in Shenzhen, China (2011).  Guimarães’ work is represented internationally at museums and private collections such as: Fondation Cartier Pour L’art Contemporain, Paris, France; Tate Modern, London, England; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA; Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo, Brazil; MoMA, New York, USA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA; Inhotim Cultural Institute, Brumadinho, Brazil; among others.

© Nara Roesler | Cao Guimarães

BY PETER WATERSCHOOT

monastery (n.)
c.1400, from Old French monastere “monastery” (14c.) and directly from Late Latin monasterium, from Ecclesiastical Greek monasterion “a monastery,” from monazein “to live alone,” from monos “alone” (see mono-). With suffix -terion “place for (doing something).” says the etymologic dictionary.

© Volume II: The hills were green and so were we - Lore Horré

Belgian photographers Iphygenia Dubois and Lore Horré found a place of total reclusion near the Franco-Belgian border. In a small town called VELAINES there is a monastery which used to host ‘Les pères Oblats de Marie Immaculée’. Used to. The place is completely abandoned. All of the old monks have passed away. Only a nightporter was still present at the time Iphygenia and Lore decided to stay there. They spent quite some time in this remote place. About 3 months living another rhythm. Experiencing silence. In a place like this, time has no real indication except sunrise and sunset, time has run slow here for decades and decades. Old men have lived the winter of their lives in this tranquility, in the varying light of all seasons.

© Lore Horré

Think about our futile business here on earth. What do you do in the rat-race in an outside world. In the outside world you wil never experience time like you will here. Let’s quote Hojoki regarding this aspect of life: “ The flow of the moving river is ceaseless, yet it is not the original water that it was. The foam floating in pools now breaks up, now comes together, and in no instance does it pause for long. The people in the world and their dwellings are also thus”.

The book MAGNOLIA was photographed and assembled in period of 3 months time which included the stay in the monastery. From February until May. From winter’s bone up to the short time the magnolia tree blooms. Only in contact with nature you can experience the fading of winter and the coming of spring. Iphygenia and Lore witnessed little lambs being born, but they had to witness them dying shortly after birth, too.

Magnolia consist of 2 books. Book one ‘the hills were green and so were we’ by Lore and book two ‘Motionless’ by Iphygenia Dubois. Both are kept together in one cover.

© Volume I: Motionless - Iphygenia Dubois

Making a book in a duo is quite a statement. Both books are bound together by a slip-cover, they function like siamese twins but at the same time they stand alone, in their own photographic identities. Experience a same setting viewed in a totally different way. A look through 2 different keyholes, 2 different windows. The combination of both gives the reader of the book a false kind of objectivity. You compare, try to find the overlap. You want to discover in just how far both female photographers extend into each other, best friends, colleagues of the same guild.

© Iphygenia Dubois

Lore works exclusively black and white ( except one duo portrait in color ), Iphygenia alternates color and black and white. Lore seems to articulate more of the psychological counterpoint of such a reclusive stay and thus handles the relationship with her fellow explorer more than Iphygenia who clearly dwelled in this photographical cornucopia with a keen eye for detail and composition. Iphygenia mostly works with the ‘objet trouvé’, Lore works more with the ‘objet intime’, but both let go of their strategy at times and cross over to the other side. This way both of the books do get a deeper intensity in their joint themes. It are not only books about a place; showing puzzle-pieces, piles of mattresses, empty corridors, washing basins, blossoming trees, crucifixes, but also folded hands, girls things, a comb in wet blond hair, breasts in a cute see through bra. Apart from the setting, they also needed to tackle the aspect of how they experienced each other. The most beautiful of all that can be called our condition humaine, we are not only thrown in this world, we are also ‘thrown on each other’, on other human beings, we can’t do easily without, and this we need to accept. The smaller a community the more clearly interdependency arises.

© Iphygenia Dubois

Most of all, magnolia is a book made by 2 photographers in their early twenties, it shows us a story about a silently letting go of a certain era, it’s all about a Coming of Age. This in stark contrast with the knowledge of all the departed monks who have lived their last days in the silence of their knowledge in these very same spaces. Magnolia therefore carries a collision between ‘spring of youth’ and ‘winter of life’.

I’d say; RIP Velaines. A big thanks to both photographers for introducing us to, first of all, themselves and secondly, to such a unique and intriguing place.

© Iphygenia Dubois | Lore Horré

A VOJAGE AU BOUT DE LA  NUIT

BY NIKI LECK

Edoardo Pasero’s  visual research range from an intimate to a more documentary view, and it is mainly focus on gender identities and body perception.

He met Joao Linneu during a journey, they became friends and then decided to collaborate. Almost by chance. As Joao told  «Edoardo had some new photos that he showed me. I liked the work yet he had no idea what to do with it. So I proposed him to make a book, and he asked me to do a project together. It was great because I felt challenged to look for some images of mine that could have a dialogue with Edoardo’s. I also had plenty of new material waiting for a reason to be shown.»

The book ‘The heart is the amorous organ of repetition’ results from this encounter. A project that rejects formal solutions and points directly to the stomach. A reaction to the chaos of existence expressed through nomads thought that generates an elusive sequence of photographs, made of referrals and re-significations. Gilles Deleuze’s influence emerges. It is a duet connoted by a simple complexity.

Pasero and Linneu’s work is a “Voyage au bout de la nuit”, an ephemeral and scathing exploration between dream and reality. They propose us a world of copies, where the difference is always reduced into analogy, negative, and therefore identical.

The rhythm of sequence is given by an alternation of subjects and emotional perceptions, which generates a stratified repetition that is never redundant. Where Edoardo cuts Joao resew, creating a  schizophrenic dialogue. A continuous examination that compares, measures and research obsessively everything in its path.

Their wild aggressiveness hurts. Loneliness and disorientation permeates the observer. Then we can feel that the author’s persistence consists in an effort to grab the realm even if not possible. 

Desire and desperation came along and suddenly their world is not so far anymore, and astonishingly it might sound familiar. This is probably the most interesting aspect of their project, the power of Pasero and Linneau’s imaginary. They engage the viewer with the promise of an hallucination that slowly reveals itself as an awakening.

© Edoardo Pasero | Joao Linneu | urbanautica Italy

BY SAMI SHALOM CHETRIT*

Musrara is a focus of attention for me, just as East Oakland in Northern California, the birthplace of the Black Panthers that started the radical phase of Black consciousness, is for Black people in America. The name Musrara cannot be uttered without also adding the words “Black Panthers”. Musrara was the driving force behind the rising social consciousness of the Mizrahim, Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origins in Israel, and continues to be an inspiration for many Mizrahim and for other movements that have come about as a result of its breakthrough. But Musrara is not Oakland. In Oakland, there is a Blank Panther school with a museum and an archive. In Oakland there is a Black Panther community center. There is a children’s curriculum called “Panther Cubs”. There is a legacy. There is a newspaper. There is a memorial to those who died in the struggle and others still in prison. There is recognition. There is respect. For us, it has been almost two generations of public denial of the Black Panthers whose “bad kids” label has been deeply ingrained in the hegemonic consciousness. But we do not forget them or their legacy. It takes time to get over the difficult images, but still, for over two decades, and owing to the Musrara School of Photography and Avi Sabag who stands at its head, we return again and again to Musrura to be strengthened and to strengthen others. 

© Avshalom Levi from the series ‘Black Panthers’

This is what the artist and photographer Avshalom Levi, a native of Musrara, does when he returns to the cradle of his childhood, to the heroes of his youth, to provide them with a wall of fame in a series of exceptionally moving photographic portraits. Photos featuring dramatic and expressive poses like these are fitting for the heroes of history, great leaders and heads of nations and states. So much power and inspiration is imparted from careful study of the faces and poses, the stance, the positioning of the hands of these heroes of the Panthers, such as the tough and uncompromising face of Charlie Biton, the intelligent eyes of Kochavi Shemesh, the defiant mustache of Revuen Aberjil, the deep grooves in the face of Avi Bardugo, the ready pose of Coco Der’i, among many others. They are all geared up, as if about to set off at any moment to lead crowds towards Zion Square. The choice of black and white, while requisite here, is not the conventional black and white, but rather light and shade that are representative of the power of the Panthers: assertive and determined black (as Golda Meir conceded), from which light, strength and hope seem to break through. There is one unusual image in the series, the force of which is equal to the entire series combined: Michael, a grandson of the Aberjil family who is sick with cancer, the cure for which exists but is not part of the government healthcare basket of drugs and services.  Michael stands bare-chested and determined, but his weak and sick body is a living reminder to all of us that we must not descend into the nostalgia of conferences and exhibitions. No-man’s land is still here. Thus, the title ‘No-Man’s Land’ is a fitting one for this exhibition and for the images that derive from it.

© Avshalom Levi ‘The house where Koko Deri grew up’ from the series ‘Musrara by Night’

Another fascinating series in the exhibition is ‘Night-Time Wanderings in Musrara’. The photographs in this series were manipulated during the editing phase, but the play of light and shadow in the original is still evident, and sometimes opens up and replicates the houses, stairwells and stone walls, and other times closes in and elevates them. Perhaps this is the neighborhood that dreams about itself at night, and maybe it is a document of the decisive changes that the neighborhood has undergone from the time it was settled with Moroccan Jews, including those who were the first to reach Israel back in 1949. The houses, alleys, and spaces that were photographed are empty of people, but overflow with yearning for those same children who once filled them with the energy of innocence and passion for life. Avshalom Levi himself grew up in the alleyways he photographed, in a downtrodden home, in a suffocating reality into which he was thrown along with his parents and siblings like the rest of this extraordinary community.  The light that he projects from his camera onto these darkened recesses is one of enormous gratitude but also a show of independence and control over his fate and his memories, which he is now able to dissolve and reconstruct like a kaleidoscope. 

Installation view from the exhibition ‘No Man’s Land’ in Jerusalem

There is not enough space here to discuss each and every photograph in each series, such as ‘Backyard’. Once again, with sharp eye and artist’s hand Avshalom Levi provides a fascinating mirror image of Israel’s backyards that can be a neglected building entrance with the remnants of the tile floors from better days, the bars of a small window on the other side of which may be an ancient treasure, or a network of drainage pipes reminiscent of the movie ‘Brazil’ (directed by Terry Gilliam in 1985). The word “backyard” in English evokes images of a green yard with a see-saw, lawn chairs, a small flower garden and children playing ball. Anyone studying the photographs of Levi’s backyard with that image in mind is in for some surprising artistic dissonance. 

The next two series in the exhibition, ‘The 31′ and ‘Transparent’, relate closely to the earlier series and in my view represent the unbearable ease with which most of us, preoccupied with work and children, are able to forget about the most dejected among us, and perhaps even worse, repress our thoughts about them in order not to see our own reflection in the sad lives and faces of those who society keeps hidden away in its back alleys, like it did in Musrara back  in the nineteen-fifties and sixties.  The ‘Transparent’ series is especially difficult and demands a brave and straightforward intense looking without blinking. 

© Avshalom Levi from the series ‘Transparent’

Levi’s artistic ability is revealed here in its full force. This is a series of portraits of women who society prefers to forget. Their gaze is hardened but at the same time gentle and helpless. Their faces and bodies tell stories that no one wants to hear. Silent screams project from their mouths. Had Levi left the photographs in black and white, as he originally shot them, he too would have been party to the syndrome of forgetting. But he took up the artist’s brush and added color to their clothes, faces and bodies, and in so doing breathed life into them, and now they are almost like the rest of us, not transparent, but colorful, like girls eager to celebrate life, the fundamental passion of every living creature, human being, and child.  Meanwhile, I was reminded of the chilling images in the series showing Levi’s search after the fate of his younger sister, which was worse than the fates of those women, as she did not even get to see the end of her teenage years. This is a difficult and brave testimony as the artist approaches this task from the depths of life experience, and not as an outside observer. This is both a curse and a gift for any artist who deals with the materials of their own life, but either way, this way of looking through the lens or the brush can only be achieved through lifeblood itself.

© Avshalom Levi from the series ‘Transparent’

Even I, a boy from a neighborhood of immigrants and laborers in Ashdod in the sixties, after looking closely at some of the faces of these women, began to love them, not out of compassion, God forbid, but slowly I recognized in them the familiar faces of women and girls from my childhood and surroundings. The more I looked, the harder it became for me to view them as objects for a work of art, as in their own lives many related to them—as objects, without a personal history of their own, without a personality, rights, wishes and dreams. I wanted to talk to them, to get to know them, to ask them things and maybe just to listen to those intense stares, if not to the words. 

The series ‘The 31′ also addresses the grace within humankind. This is a series of thirty-one portraits of Holocaust survivors who find themselves among the dwindling number of living witnesses to the Jewish atrocity that took place in Europe. The portraits are in black and white as if they were already part of a forgotten archive. In addition to the portraits there are a number of color photographs of empty living rooms that belong to some of the sitters. This is a sophisticated and complex view of the reality of remembrance and forgetting. The colorful testimony of life is void of their presence. I appreciate this series in the context of Musrara and the Black Panthers, because grace is universal. So too is the basis of any struggle for social reform. The Black Panthers spoke in the universal language of justice and equality.  

© Avshalom Levi from the series ‘Survivors’

Levi’s own artistic efforts in this series are a measure of grace. A child of Musrara, his young country’s leaders, some whom were themselves Holocaust survivors, preferred to forget the existence of the little boy whose dreams were almost squashed. This child of Musrara carries within himself that memory, but not as trauma, or obsession, but as a daily life lesson: to not forget those who it is easiest to forget, to not abandon in the field those left behind. No doubt, the act of resistance to forgetting, to erasing, is an act of change; it is a political act and it is universal. This is, in my opinion, the central theme of this entire exhibition that joins the chain of action that has been continuing from inside Musrara for over half a century. A chain whose links are sometimes made of iron, sometimes of gold, sometime a punch from a fist, sometimes a hand extended in friendship and peace. The hand on the camera of the artist Avshalom Levi is a hand of grace. 

* Prof. Sammy Shalom Chetrit is the author of The Mizrahi Struggle in Israel (Am Oved 2004, in Hebrew), and the director, along with the late Eli Hamu, of the 2003 film Black Panthers Speak. 

‘No Man’s Land’
curated by Avi Sabag and Eyal Ben Dov.
Musrara Gallery, Jerusalem
26.03.15 - 21.05.15

To purchase the bilingual book please contact Avshalom via mail: avsha3@gmail.com or Facebook

© Avshalom Levi | urbanautica Israel

BY SHEUNG YIU

He has put couples in tiny bathtubs, he has sealed couples in futon vacuum bags, it is puzzling how he can get his friends and sometimes complete stranger from the clubs in Tokyo to go through the things he put them through. For a decade, he has shoot copious amount of quirky couple portraits, but beneath the veil of vividness is his strong desire to spread love to the world. On his website, he writes ‘From two people to a group, a town to a community, a city to a country, from border to border, the ring of love shall prevail.’

I met Japanese photographer HAL in Hong Kong Photo Book Fair earlier in March. He was presenting his photo projects in Hong Kong Art Centre with other Japanese photographers. I was lucky enough to be invited by the photographer, well known for his series of portraits of couples in vacuum bag, to get some behind-the-scene photos of his shoot in Hong Kong. We talked about the story behind the project.

(The Q & A below is an edited transcript of HAL’s response to my question. 

© Photo credit: Tam Kwai Hung and Sheung Yiu

Why are you interested in photographing couple?

Out of all matters, love is the most important element in the world. All worldly matters point towards the existence of love. And the most suitable subject to embody the concept of love is a couple.

Why do you have this idea of putting couples in vacuumed plastic bags?

Men and women are attracted to each other and try to become one. This fundamental desire carries an energy that affects all matters in the world. I wonder why human pay such an effort to become one, maybe we were originally one.

I visualise the mutual attraction and power of love by literally putting couples together. Gravity are felt stronger when two objects are closer to each other. Chemical adhesion is more powerful when glue is thinly applied. The power of love, just like gravity and adhesion, is greatest when two people are the closest.

I decided to ‘vacuum-pack’ couples as a method to express coherence.

© Photo credit: Tam Kwai Hung and Sheung Yiu

© Photo credit: Tam Kwai Hung and Sheung Yiu

How do you approach the couples? What is the reaction when they knew that they were to be put in a vacuumed plastic bag?

I look for couples to shoot anywhere anytime, sometimes I find my models through social networks.

Everyone is surprised when I told them about the vacuumed bag. I only shoot couples who are opened to the idea. 

Reactions on set are of two extremes. Some couples were rather easy to shoot. Other just did not work no matter how hard we tried.

© Photo credit: Tam Kwai Hung and Sheung Yiu

There have been a lot of discussions around Japanese love culture, the commoditization of love, the sexual fetishes and perversion. Was your project influenced by these ideas or was it a separate story? In what social context should we understand your work?

My work is original, I did not make these connections when I shoot, but I grew up in Japan, maybe I am really influenced by these ideas, but the influence is an unconscious one.

© Photo credit: Tam Kwai Hung and Sheung Yiu

Which is the favourite couple that you have photographed in ‘Flesh Love’?

Every photo is important to me.

Who (artists and/or photographers) inspires your work?

Traditional Japanese photographer such as Daido Moriyama.

© HAL | urbanautica Hong Kong

BY DIETER DEBRUYNE

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

My most sincere and innocent answer would be “thanks to my father”. He was passionate about photography and he collected magazines like “Objectif Photo” and “Camera”. With him, I discovered basic techniques of photography, famous photographers and the section of female nudes in the magazines!
I got my first camera for my communion, a Kodak Instamatic with which I missed all the shots of the event. Later, I start borrowing my father’s camera, a 24x36 Mamiya 500 TTL that I still use today. With it, I photographed my immediate environment: my garden, my parents, my dog… all that was close to me, in a “testimonial” way.

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

I started photography seriously when I entered at the photography school. It was 3 endless years but with the people I met there, we formed a nice group of friends! There, I discovered the darkroom and developed a real passion for black and white. The ability to control all the process, from negative film to enlargement, was a great exitement for me.

At 21 years old, I had my laboratory at home. We gathered there with my friends for endless nights, like painters in their attic. It was a time full of romanticism! At that time, I decided to become a photographer but it was simply my pleasure that guided my impulses, the pleasure of taking pictures.

© Rafael Monzo

© Rafael Monzo

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

To create means mastering a more or less difficult technique (and photography is a quite simple technique) and using this technique to achieve an exhilarating result for the senses: pleasures like capturing light, composing within live spaces and encounters, it’s the same for analogue or digital photography.
Social networks are wonderful tools to show works and results to a very large audience.

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

My research is based on my personal satisfaction. In a more metaphysical way, nostalgic as I am, I would say that it is also to “catch time”. But it is just an ascertainment, not the initial reason of my actions. I must add another pleasure, that of “communion” with landscapes that I shoot.

© Rafael Monzo

© Rafael Monzo

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

For film photography, I have been working with the same cameras for 20 years (I am a romantic !): for 24x36, I use Nikon FM2, Mamiya 500 TTL, Leica CM. I always shoot with TMAX 400 KODAK. This film has an emulsion that is suitable for all types of situations. For medium format, I use Mamiya 645 or Fuji 6x9. At last, for digital photography, I use a Canon 5D MARKII.

6. Tell us about your latest project ‘Ufologie’ 

My latest project is called ‘Ufologie’. Last year, I had an accident and I was immobilized for more than 6 months. During this convalescence, I decided to digitally manipulate old photos and transform them into something artistic. ‘Ufologie’ was born of my inability to move and, despite that, of my desire to travel mentally through space by creating some kind of recycled flying objects.

© Rafael Monzo

7. I notice you combine or mirror two pictures to make one image; what’s the advantage for you and is not ‘just’ a technique to make something interesting?

I used the symmetry differently in two projects. To ‘Monochromes’ series, I was interested in the creative act of a new landscape based on their symmetry. In this series the two works are separated by a white space, framing each part by itself, in isolation. But if we look at the two sides together they form a pictorial dichotomy based on this new image. In ‘Ufologie’ the idea was to develop some flyers basing objects in the kaleidoscopic image. I wanted to build, develop and invent from heavy industrial buildings such as steel, brick and wood, very light flying objects, able to hover weightlessly. I have to say that the project ‘Ufologie’ arises because of an accident that immobilized me for several months and that allowed me to work the photographs digitally.

8. I see that your work shows many differences in approach. What is for you the common theme? Or do you photograph what you pass by?

To me, photography is life itself. It is a communication and enables the exchange of experiences. It allows us to show others what we see, things that fascinate us, people and places we love and hold dear. In that sense I am true to my personal approach in which I capture impulsively in my photographic diary. In my projects or series I have no great difference in my creative or artistic approach and I always work in black and white. My series usually have as common nexus of landscapes, cities and architecture.

© Rafael Monzo

© Rafael Monzo

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

To name only 3: Alberto Garcia Alix, a wonderful Spanish photographer. Daido Moriyama I consider the Master of street photography and Jacob Aue Sobol, from Magnum Agency, artist of black and white who is able to make masterpieces in photo reportages.

10. Three books of photography that you recommend?

- ‘No me sigas que estoy perdido’ by Alberto Garcia Alix (76-86 Ed. La Fabrica)
- ‘Congo in Limbo’ by Cédric Gerbehaye (Ed. Le bec en l’air)
- Fazal Sheikh edition by Fundacion Mapfre.

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

Nothing recently but I remember a few, including “Congo in limbo” that I saw in Brussels or some works of Roger Ballen that I love.

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

For now, I am as agitated as a Martini! I always have ideas that I keep in “work in progress” and I juggle them according to my moods. I also follow a course of wet collodion process, as a way to return to the sources of the photography.

© Rafael Monzo

13. How do you see the future of photography in general evolve?

As long as there are photographers, there will be upholders of artistic, documentary, remembrance, testimonial or anthropological photography. In my case, I classify photography in two big categories: the good and the bad ones. I mean that photography is always linked with progress and it evolves with us, with our time, and it’s true for film as for digital photography. It is our time machine for things that will never return but still shine through photography.

© Rafael Monzo | urbanautica Belgium

We are SELECTING interesting Belgian photography works to EXHIBIT at GALLERY BROWNINGin Italy, and to be introduced on our Journal. JOIN OUR PORTFOLIO REVIEW IN GHENT NEXT JUNE!!!

We decided not to be just a leading online photography publisher but to be more tangible and to get closer to our readers and followers. The portfolio review is the kick – off for a different approach. The first stage will be hosted at Zebrapoint, in Ghent, Belgium. With our expertise and visability we offer a thorough view on your portfolio/work! The seats are limited to 25 candidates.

We hope to see you soon at Zebrapoint (www.zebrastraat.be) on the 13th of june 2015. We will be discussing your portfolio from 14-18h. Online subscriptions can be made through mail to dieter@urbanautica.com. Please attach your CV, website and pdf or description of the projects to be reviewed onto the mail. Prints are very welcome during the review!

Entry – fees are 25 euro for students (< 25 years old) and 50 euro for professionals (> 25 years old) paid by cash at the review (please confirm by email) or by Paypal from the homepage of www.urbanautica.com before 7th of June. A time-schedule will be made for the participants! No time wasted.

And an informal meeting/ feedback moment at Irish pub (Lindelei) Ghent will be organized from 20h…

4 portfolios will be selected for a special introduction to be featured on URBANAUTICA!

Urbanautica will also be selecting photographers and works for its EXHIBITION “wat is België?/Quelle est la belgique?” curated by Steve Bisson, at Galleria Browning, in Italy.

…

The 4 REVIEWERS are:

Peter Waterschoot (BE) Ghent based photographer who creates what he calls ‘Neon Poetry’. Peter is also the mind behind ART WALL a special event held in Ghent. Peter also, once and a while, likes to reflect (in his rather specific visceral style) on the oeuvre of other artists. Peter is a contributor editor of Urbanautica since 2014.

Isolde De Buck (BE) is an Art Historian and completed a degree in Press and Communication at the University of Ghent. From 2004 she works as an Art Consultant, Curator, Researcher and Exhibition Commissioner for the Foundation Liedts-Meesen and Art Platform at Zebrastraat, Belgium.

Klaus Fruchtnis (FR) is a Paris based French-Colombian digital artist, researcher and educator. Klaus is currently the Chair of Photography at Paris College of Art. Klaus is a contributor editor of Urbanautica since 2015.

Steve Bisson (IT) is an Italo-belgian art director, curator and critic. Steve Bisson has worked for museums, galleries, publishers, foundations, corporations, and cultural institutions all over the world. Steve is the chief editor of Urbanautica.

…

INFO
Urbanautica Belgium
dieter@urbanautica.com

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BY KRZYSZTOF SIENKIEWICZ

1. Tola, who are you as a photographer? What interests you the most in this medium?

What fascinated me the most in this medium from the very beginning was the element of surprise involved in the process. I remember how as a kid, I was always impatient to see the results of my work and couldn’t wait to pick them up from the photography store. The  Polish word for develop,  "wywołać" (to conjure) already had some magic in it. It was a bit like conjuring a ghost. I still use analogue cameras, so the excitement of the process remains there. Back then photography was a way of keeping things without taking them back home. Nowadays, I use photography as a tool to express my thoughts. It allows me to explore themes and issues that currently interest me, without having to resort to words. I also like that it’s a very individual activity. No one can choose what is inside the frame for you. When I photograph, I am surprisingly assertive and honest with myself. This is something that doesn’t come naturally to me in real life.

© Antonina Gugała from the series ‘Animal Kingdom’

2. You are not a trained photographer, although you have spent some time at the Academy of Photography in Warsaw. You are just about to graduate from the University of Warsaw with a master’s degree in psychology. Could you tell us how did your educational path influence your photography?

The good thing about studying psychology is that you are constantly surrounded by psychologists. The people that taught me had a very open and constructive approach to their students. This was the perfect environment to nurture my interests in film and photography. After three years of studying psychology I was feeling confident enough to take a year off school and dedicate it entirely to photography. That’s when I signed up for Academy of Photography. The course I attended was a mix of fascinating meetings with active photographers and art historians. I learned a lot during this year and it took me some time to digest this knowledge and put it into action. When I got back into psychology I was already a different person. I started using psychology for entirely new processes. For example, I used some study results from cognitive psychology when I was editing my first photobook.  

3. In the description of one of your projects called “6x9” you write: “Edges define what’s inside. 6x9 is a set of images I found on the edges of a city.” Could you develop this relation and tell us, how did you approach this subject through photography?

In “6x9” I wanted to explore the relationship between space and identity. I needed to identify and define the space that I was born in and had been living in for the biggest part of my life, Warsaw. As an environmental psychologist I am convinced that space has a deep influence on us.  In a way by defining the space surrounding me, I was defining myself. The project was created during a 5 month long photography workshop that I attended between May and September 2012 - Migawki. This was my first attempt at conceiving a series of photographs. Before that I had been working spontaneously, without any further plans for the end results. This time, I had a deadline and a plan to fulfill. The plan was to take few photographs and think a lot about what I was doing in-between. While taking pictures for ‘6x9′ I walked kilometers around the rough edges of Warsaw. I only stopped when I saw something that was interesting enough to take out my bulky, folding Nettar camera and use up one of the 8 images that each medium format film would give me. And I must say that I really enjoyed this process. The limitations that I set out for myself in this project helped me deal with the selection process afterwards.

© Antonina Gugała from the series ‘Animal Kingdom’

4. Your latest project entitled ‘Animal Kingdom’ depicts… animals in your everyday life. Could you tell us more about this project?

‘Animal Kingdom’ was a very interesting experience for me as a photographer. It started off as a typical documentary project. I was going to photograph the architecture of the Warsaw ZOO. I was fascinated by the way in which architecture, which I believe to be a strongly human centered domain, was used to attend the needs and wants of animals. Of course, most of these attempts were terribly unsuccessful or, in the best case, ridiculous, but it was quite fascinating to watch the results of people playing God’s role. So at first I started working in my usual way – I got a yearly ticket to the Warsaw ZOO and I started walking. But something wasn’t working, I was ready to abandon this project and then… there was John Berger and his essay ‘How to look at Animals’.  I suddenly realized that all this time I had been ignoring the most important subject – the animal. That was when the project turned into a cultural research and suddenly the photographs I had taken in the ZOO became useless. After months of reading about animals and their place in contemporary culture, I came to the conclusion that the only thing that I could be certain of is that the animality we are dealing with is the human construction of animality. That’s when I decided to go back to my photo archives and analyze, which animals and in which way I had photographed in the past. My intention was to analyze the way in which animals are depicted in everyday photography. I think that this can give you a notion of what the relationship between “human” and “animal” is. 

Video of the photobook ‘Animal Kingdom′

5. In fact, both ‘6x9′ and ‘Animal Kingdom’ were published as photobooks. The „6x9” book was even shortlisted for the UNSEEN Dummy Award in 2013. You seem to find yourself quite comfortable within this medium. Do you prefer it over an exhibition? What possibilities does it give you that an exhibition doesn’t?

The decision to make 6x9 into a photobook was quite egoistic. I wanted to make something that would last. I didn’t feel that the exhibition of yet another “young and talented” wannabe photographer would make a change. By making a book I wouldn’t be left with empty hands, literally.  I was also inspired by a talk given by Paweł Szypulski, a photobook addict and visual artist, who visited our workshops to share his view on photography and show his massive collection of photobooks. I was immediately drawn to all of these beautiful publications. Before this my experience with photobooks had been close to none. When I set out to make my first photobook, I had an intuition of what the size of the object and the size of the pictures inside should be. I wanted the book to be comfortable to hold in your hands, I wanted it to be minimalistic in form but rich content wise. I wanted quite a few things, and I have no idea where all of these wants came from, but I remember that I was rather assertive about it. Being selected for the UNSEEN Dummy Shortlist was a great surprise for me and it wouldn’t have been possible without the collaboration that I started with Michał Kożurno - the designer of the book. 

Video of the photobook ‘6x9′

6. Michał Kożurno is an important person in your creative activity. You usually work on your books with him as a graphic designer. Could you tell us more about this process? 

Michał Kożurno is a longtime friend of mine. When I was working on 6x9, I read a text by Jorg Colberg on mistakes often made by photographers who set out to make their photobooks. One of the comments that stuck with me was that you should trust other people to help you with things that you know little about. Colberg’s text was very encouraging on the subject of collaboration. I’m a very controlling person, so this was a difficult decision to make, but I decided to give it a try. I contacted the only friend that I could possibly think of in terms of making books – Michał. Back then Michał was a leather and paper conservation student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He knew more about paper and glue than any other of my friends and I knew I could trust him. In the beginning the plan was that I would provide the content for the book and Michał would figure out the form for it. He made a point of keeping the right balance between the different elements of the publication, my photographic concept had to resonate in the form of the book. As we quickly found out, it was impossible to separate these two roles, so during the process we were constantly in dialogue, making suggestions to one another. Looking back, I feel that I was very lucky to have listened to this piece of advice from Mr. Colberg. We differ in many ways with Michał and I think that this makes our work more interesting.

© Antonina Gugała from the series ‘6x9

 What do you like to look at? Could you list some photographers or bookmakers that inspire you?

I try to look at as many things as possible, but I don’t think that there is one particular way of photographing that inspires me. My work is very intuitive and has not changed much since I first started taking pictures, so any kind of inspiration is always unconscious. For example, I remember that when I first started reading about photography and discovered William Eggleston, I was in genuine shock (sic!) of how similar my photographic interests were. I had been drawing inspiration from his work without knowing it. The only way of explaining this is through film. Before getting into photography, I had been deeply interested in film. All of my favorite filmmakers, Jim Jarmusch, Tony Gatlif, Harmony Korine, Larry Clark, have a very strong visual style. When I started studying photography I realized how strong its connection with the cinema world was. I still watch a lot of films, but I guess that my main source of inspiration now is my environment.  

© Antonina Gugała from the series ‘6x9

8. Could you comment on the Polish photography scene? 

I feel that photography is in a good spot in Poland right now. Many interesting events are taking place around photography and they gather big crowds every time. New, interesting names seem to be popping up everywhere. Of course, we also have to deal with the problem of overabundance of images here, but there are new “filters” being created everyday to solve this problem. New magazines, galleries and art institutions seem to be doing a good job at processing all of this content and curating it. Two visual artists whose work I admire are Aneta Grzeszykowska and Karol Radziszewski.

9. Are you working on anything new now? Do you have any plans for the near future connected with photography?

I am working on the concept of a new series. This time my thoughts are focused around the subject of body, gender and consumerism. Hopefully I will be able to find the right balance between the visual and theoretical side of this project. A lot has already been said on this subject in photography, but I hope to find a new set of images to illustrate the relationship between these elements. I am also excited about the perspective of taking up further education in photography, hopefully beginning next year.

© Antonina Gugała | urbanautica Poland

BY ELINE BENJAMINSEN

1. Hi Line. Recently you’ve received prestigious international prizes and attention for your project ‘Time to Rest’ about truck drivers in Norway, including an Honorable Mention from the NPPA and Honorable Merit in Picture of the Year International. Congratulations! How did this project take form?

When studying photojournalism you get very aware that you shouldn’t have any prejudices or be biased in any way. I see myself, in all modesty, as a generally un-bigoted person. It started with curiosity around truck drivers and the fact that although I didn’t know any of them personally, I had certain ideas around what characteristics they have. I started asking others what they thought about truck drivers, and discovered that they also had very concrete ideas. They were said to be big, scary, had bad diets, ostentatious… People described the drivers like the trucks, basically. I thought this was very interesting. If you google ‘truck driver’ everything that comes up are negative articles about road accidents and law breaking. All the “bad things”.  

Then I started reading about the laws that they have to relate to. In Norway you’ll see trucks standing the weirdest of places. That made me curious. They are bound by strict regulations around when they can drive and when they can rest, meaning that many places they have to stop are not secure for the load they are transporting. This makes them vulnerable. The rate of truck robberies happening during resting time is increasing. The rules are also making it difficult for them to come together. They get very lonely. I wanted to find out who chooses a life like this.

© Line Søndergaard from the series ‘Time to Rest’

I drove constantly for three weeks, and then I had some trips later on when I had the time. So I’d drive around looking for trucks in the landscape, and then when the night fell I’d look for the ones who were resting. I worked without any appointments. So I’d knock on the door of the trucks and ask if I could sleep there that night. There is something about stepping into somebody’s’ private space without having had any appointment beforehand. Nobody could tidy their place, as they often do when they are getting a photographer over. I practically stepped into the condition they existed in there and then. 

Another thing is the influence of the nighttime. The things one talks about at day time are often very concrete, more practical and trivial… at night it takes much less time to reach a point were you are talking about things like seeing your wife only once a week, and that if you start counting you haven’t seen your four kids for much of their lives. Conversation becomes a totally different thing in the nighttime.

The reason why I decided to do the intimate sleeping portraits was the effect that seeing somebody sleeping has on people. I think everybody get this sort of caring instinct from seeing others sleep. When sleeping we become fragile, naked. I thought that if I can make a series that will make people want to hug truck drivers, then it’s a healthy counterbalance to the obvious associations and stereotyping.

© Line Søndergaard from the series ‘Time to Rest’

2. The way you present the project is a pretty new way of showing photography, as an interactive online publication. What made you decide to present it that way? Did you present it in other formats too?

No. That project is meant to be published in that format. Only a small part of it has been published in a newspaper.

3. I think many photographers see books as the ideal platform for their projects. Do you see that as something romantic or outdated?

The idea of photography books is absolutely romantic! I love photography books and own many myself. Photography is great in the format of books. It’s not that one thing eliminates the other, that because I make online publications I’m uninterested in books. But I’m not even finished with my studies yet. To make a book is something you do when you’ve had a 15 year long career, isn’t it? When you’ve reached a point where you have stability in what you do. Every day I feel that I discover something new that makes me distance myself from what I made the day before. Which I’ll hopefully have the rest of my life, or I think I’ll become very boring. But the idea of a book… I believe that’s something you do when you’ve made something really legit.

© Line Søndergaard from the series ‘Time to Rest’

4. What do you think about photography in the age of digitalization?

I think it’s really exciting! It’s liberating to be able to choose how to present each story, and what instruments in combination you want to use. I want to keep making one-pages like the one for ‘Time to Rest’, and I’d like to work on making them together with others who have competence in different fields than me.

It also creates new audiences. As mentioned, ‘Time to Rest’ was published in a newspaper too. From that I noticed that I got responses from a totally different group of people than from the online publication that is accessible for everybody free of charge. What’s great about making digital publications is that you get in touch with a new audience.

5. Tell us about your approach to photography. How did it all start out?

I haven’t actually photographed for that long – my original practice was film and TV documentaries. Usually people tend to start doing still photography and then turn to moving image, I did the opposite.

I don’t remember having any brilliant poetic revelation that I was going to become a photographer. But I remember that I lied a lot when I was a kid. I loved telling stories and since I didn’t experience new things every day, I’d make things up. As I grew older I realized that the real world was way more interesting than what my own limited imagination could produce – and I turned to documentary.

The best part was getting people interested in what I had to tell. Why I started doing film in the first place had to do with that need to tell stories. But after a while I noticed that I was forcing everything into the format of film, and that maybe not all stories suited that format. And then I started thinking it was unfair that because I knew how to tell stories in video, reality had to adjust to that limited tool kit. That’s why I decided to study photojournalism, so that I would learn tools that would allow me to decide what visual format best suited each story. 

© Line Søndergaard from the series ‘Womandatory Conscription’

© Line Søndergaard from the series ‘Womandatory Conscription’

Since then I’ve become more and more seduced by photography. Before I started studying photojournalism at the University College in Oslo, I had a very practical way of seeing visual storytelling. I’ve later understood that a photograph can be something on its own, that it’s not always about a concrete story; that it can evoke moods and emotions.

6. I saw some short videos that you made where you mixed video and stills.

Yes, that was a sort of a phase I went through where I was trying to combine the two. But I always have it that whatever I made half a year ago I think is outdated because I’ve made progress in-between and therefore I don’t recognize myself in it anymore. Nowadays I don’t mix moving and still image, as I see that I have to settle for one or the other or none will be good. It’s a challenge to find a way where you can keep the integrity of all the tools the same time. To me it’s not only to turn the button on the camera to video modus and back, it’s a totally different mindset altogether.

7. You’re about to graduate from your studies in photojournalism at the University College in Oslo. Can you tell us about the study?

First of all the classes are pretty small which I think is vital for the functionality of the study. I think photography is such a personal subject; it’s about what you feel, what you think and what you yourself see. Therefore it’s crucial to be comfortable with the study environment. I think if I were one out of a huge group, I would receive much more general feed back. What has been so great about this education is that you are able to really get to know each teacher. They have the time and capacity to get to know the students individually, and are good at pointing out factors in my process that I don’t myself notice.

8. Have there been any teachers that have influenced how you see your work in particular?  

I used to become way too attached to my subjects, sometimes becoming more concerned about being with them than to photograph. During the making of the project ‘Time to Rest’ last year I had a teacher, Jon Petter Evensen, who was extremely good at seeing not only what I knew and did well, but also where I have a tendency to get stuck and how he could push me to feel freer to achieve something different than what I’d made before. When I had this idea about truck drivers, he advised me not to do what I’d always done up until then, which was to live with people for a long period of time. Instead he advised me to drive my own car, stop, go in and leave again - not to work on the premises of others. That project developed to be what it is because of this advice.

© Line Søndergaard form the series ‘Return to Sender’

© Line Søndergaard from the series ‘Return to Sender’

9. What would be the ideal working situation for you? Any plans for the future?

I have to confine to reality as it is, and there aren’t many jobs for photographers anymore. One thing I learned from working at the newspaper was that I need to be surrounded by competent people who can give me feedback, and vice versa. I can fool around in my own head and my own camera and my own little world, and try to figure out what photographer I want to become, how I want to work and which methods to use, but I can get so blind on my own work. I need people to agree and disagree with, people I can’t understand and those I fully relate to. Some people are good at working alone, but I’m not.

So to talk about the future, I think I’ll need to create that environment myself, since I probably won’t get that from anywhere else. I want to collect all those that I’ve clashed with in one way or another! I think this is important for more people than me, to create our own community that can give the same type of support as an editorial team. I you can develop yourself as a photographer alone, but that we are only able to develop photography as a subject together.

10. That makes a lot of sense. Do you imagine an official creative collective or an informal group of people who meet from time to time to discuss work?

I don’t have any visions of fancy names or anything. Nor ambitions to make it anything else than to have a few good colleagues that I can exist in the same room with. It’s more about being able to work together with people, although you’re always busy doing your own stuff.

To find a balance between fast assignments and long lasting projects, that’s the ideal situation for me. Although I think you will have a hard time finding photography students that wouldn’t say the same.

11. How would you like your photography to be read? In other words, what do you hope to achieve?

Oh, the big questions… at one point or another during your life you think that it would be possible to change the world. I grew up thinking not that I would be able to change the world but that I had to do it! This is an idealist mindset that I ridicule; yet I absolutely stand for it. You have to! Because if I didn’t, what would be the point of making anything if I didn’t hope that it would influence in one way or another?

I don’t believe that one photograph can change anything. However, when looking at photography, it doesn’t always go through the head first, sometimes it can go straight ‘in’. And I think that if I can touch one other person a tiny little bit, it can start a process. Maybe this one person will be able to touch three others and suddenly there are four people who have had new thoughts that they didn’t have yesterday.

© Line Søndergaard from the series ‘Det Gylden Landet’

© Line Søndergaard from the series ‘Det Gylden Landet’

12. Like the butterfly effect?

Yes, I think it needs to come down to that level for it to be something I can believe in. Another thing about photography is that it’s universal. I can get as much out of photography as any dement grandpa can. It will mean something else for him than for me, but none of us will feel alienated by it.
Photography is concrete and open at the same time. That’s what’s so lovely about it.

13. Are there any themes or subjects that you see recurring in your work?

I don’t really have any specific themes, but I come across things I don’t really understand, and then I try to photograph them. But if I look back at these three years at school, I suppose I’ve photographed a lot of older men. I have no clue what that is all about, and I don’t think I want to know neither. I think my next project needs to be about 14 year old girls, because I’m very afraid of them - definitely much more than of truck drivers!

I generally photograph things I don’t know too much about. Nowadays I even try not to do too much research before I go photographing, because I’ve noticed that if I bring too many “cheating notes” I can get blocked by what I already know instead of fully being in the situation. It’s a challenge to learn so much about a subject that I’m able to put myself in the right situation, and then having to tell myself to forget everything I know not to get blocked while I’m there!

© Line Søndergaard from the series ‘Time to Rest’

14. Do you have any preferences around cameras and equipment?

At the moment I use three cameras: a Canon mark III, my grandpa’s Rolleiflex and an Olympus. When it comes to equipment, I like to use cameras that I know so well that I won’t have to think about how I’m using them. But it’s also great to use cameras that I really don’t know, because the confusion of that makes me stop overthinking the composition and lighting, which I regularly do and which can be very boring. I recently put an almost black filter on my camera so I wouldn’t see through it when I photographed, to see if I would be able to shoot pictures that would be less of a direct translation than of ‘this is what I’ve seen and thought’. I took some really great photos before I knew how to photograph. Now it sometimes has the tendency to get a bit too pretty and “correct”.

15. What are your three favorite photography books?

‘Southbound’ by Knut Egil Wang – It’s unbelievably beautifully made
‘Fat Baby’ by Eugene Richards – one of the first photo books I owned and one I often return to.  
‘Amazonas’ by Mads Nissen – sensitive in the way it’s edited.

16. What photographers and artists have inspired you?

Of photographers it would be Antoine D'Agata, Alec Soth and James Nachtwey, the fabulous women Lynsey Addario, Nan Goldin, Sally Man, and Mary Ellen Mark. Others are Edward Hopper, Roy Anderson and Wong Kar-Wai.

© Line Søndergaard | urbanautica Scandinavia