URBANAUTICA

BY RENATA SCOVINO

© Ilma Guideroli, ‘panorama_lotação’

The artist’s book Ilma Guideroli detects certain issues that reflect her previous production with photography and collage: the fragmented, stacked or transient spaces; the places of thought; mappings and their misrepresentations. ‘panorama_lotação’ shows us the result of recordings made from inside a minibus, a journey that lasted a few months while the artist was working in a district located in the far eastern city of São Paulo. The publication is presented as a kind of linear labyrinth, printed on both sides and allowing several folds.

In carrying out the work you use an analog camera, the negative goes through several processes before obtaining the final image. This path shows a mixture between control and chance - to make this chance visible, some planning is necessary, most of the time the process involves no real reactions, a sort of improvisation. Tell us how you captured and treated the images for the book.

Ilma Guideroli (IG): I believe that chance is present in various forms in my artistic production. In the case of ‘panorama_lotação’, I made the images using an analog plastic camera, called a Lomo. I like that kind of camera because it gives me more freedom to work in crowded places, without attracting attention - people often do not even realize that I’m photographing - and the possibility of moving the film in parts rather than a complete picture allows me to create overlaps between frames. The results are diverse, since they depend on the location, the light condition, the sensitivity of the photographic film used, how the camera is positioned and when the film is advanced manually.

© Ilma Guideroli, ‘panorama_lotação’

After developing the negative, they pass through the scanning process. In the case of this work, instead of using a scanner, I set up an apparatus made from a shoebox and a light source, and I photographed the negatives with a digital camera . The results were images with a bluish tint (expected due to the offset) and a more diffuse light on one side of an image. I ended up incorporating this blue cast, which creates an atmosphere of strangeness, a place that does not really exist.

Michel de Certeau in his book ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ suggests that the writer in the act of reporting reality designs and builds living spaces. «In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a 'metaphor’ - a bus or a train. Stories could also take this noble name: every day, they traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories.» It can be said that you perform this type of description with your images?

IG: The dynamics established from the time the book is opened are in fact related to accommodation spaces described by Michel Certeau in that there is a shuffle, sort of game, each time the images are regrouped and rearranged. But unlike a conventional game, there are rules to follow. A little bit like with a kaleidoscope, where the images provoke reflections and reverberations.

© Ilma Guideroli, ‘panorama_lotação’, Book view

Your work translates into the space / time of the image the reactivation of the experience of a course of everyday life, so it incorporates mobility as a basic feature, it belongs to the scope of the movement. It is a fruition through a stream, images appear continuously, as if you ignore the organization in frames that the opening and closing of the shutter impose. Thus no separate parts, and hence there is no hierarchy between the parts. Do you agree?

IG: The trajectories are made in order to get lost: there is no hierarchy between the official and the alternative ones, both meet and fuse with the same importance, indefinitely. If a path is determined by continuous lines, it can be influenced and / or interrupted by another line. Or, at times, a fragment determines the route in a sort of incomplete and obsolete guide, in other continuity is established in the chaos.

© Ilma Guideroli, ‘panorama_lotação’

Thus ‘panorama_lotação’ is not exactly a narrative because, despite being arranged in a straight line, that line can be broken and the images recombined with the book handling and the different ways to make the folds. The viewers’ actions break the flow we talked about earlier, and make the time pass to present itself as modulations. Overlays, mergers, repetitions are now open itineraries ready to be modified and reinvented, destroying the direct relationship of before and after. The book incorporates the action of transformation. When you started this work, did you have the book in mind as a final product?

IG: No. As soon as I saw the images, I began to think of them from a panoramic point of view, referring to a continuity. I thought about video, but soon realized I wanted something manipulable, on the scale of hands, and printed; the screen seemed very far and with few possibilities of interaction.

© Ilma Guideroli, ‘panorama_lotação’, Book view

But the linear format just did not give a correct account to the multiple combinations that the viewers would have at their disposal. Thus I looked for a solution that had a little of both, and the final configuration was a folded binding, the sheets were printed double-sided and folded in half; so it’s unclear where the images begin and end, and it was precisely what I sought.

There is also an inaccuracy between document and fiction in the images. In the words of artist Francis Aly; «whereas the highly rational societies of the Renaissance felt the need to create utopias, we of our times must create fables.» It is impossible to say everything about something or a place, there is always something left to learn from, and that is something that remains generating fable - which departs from the colloquial, the real… Would you say that in the book, what matters is not exactly what is being reported, but the possibility of opening a space for the construction of a fantastic universe?

IG: Yes, and over the work building process that was becoming increasingly clear. I believe there are several indications in the images that recall the imagination: the color blue that reminds the Cyanotype and creates an atmosphere that does not match reality, rather something dreamlike. Overlays, reverberations and repetitions accentuate that character. In addition there is a dynamic that complies with the changing scenes, which is directly related to my point of view, that of capturing images from a bus while following an everyday journey. So I think there are many layers overlapping not only at the moment of registration, but also concerning the negatives, scanning, printing…

© Ilma Guideroli, ‘panorama_lotação’

This reminds me of the way Michel Foucault speaks of the mirror. For him, the mirror is a mixed experience, an unreal space that opens up virtually behind the surface as a kind of shadow and at the same time, it is something that actually exists, in the sense that it makes this place that we occupy absolutely real in relation to all the space that surrounds us. In your work, the translucent, immaterial, the ghostly, gives this sense of virtual, as if the images had no place, as if seen in a mirror. This creates an atmosphere of contact distance, however nothing is insignificant in that transparency. There is a conflict between the surface and depth. As if all we see there lives forever and at the same time, dies every moment. Something that does not end. Will you put an end point?

IG: I prefer to think of a cyclical continuity rather than an end point. And with ‘panorama_lotação’ I believe I could transpose this concept to the material. Of course there are always limitations, but often what we think as support can be rethought infinitely. My production has this cyclicality, since working with different media and supports. I have no fondness for analogue photography to digital, for example. It depends on what each project asks. I’ve had works where I started with drawing and then repercussions and layers took me to the installation, collage, and then back to the drawing. I like to face my production with a range of open and interchangeable possibilities.

BY STEVE BISSON AND ROBIN GELDHOF

© Book ‘Landscape Materials’, Urbanautica Collections, published by L’Artiere

Talk to us about how you started photography. What do you remember about your first photographs?

Edoardo Hahn (EH): It seems like I have been doing photography for as long as I can remember. I have always considered it the best way to be confronted with the reality surrounding me. Images force you to see the world in a different way. They force you to reflect upon the appearance of an object, a landscape or a person you are looking at.

More so than my first photographs, which I don’t have clear memories of, I remember my first project for school. I was 12 years old at the time. It was given to us by our teacher as a summer assignment. We had to tell a story with words and images about the place where we spent our holidays.

© Edoardo Hahn, Los Angeles, USA, 2013

How has your approach to photography evolved throughout time?

EH: Well, a lot of things have changed. I studied photography, evidently not only from a technical point of view, but mainly its ability to communicate. It has always been a slow unpredictable progress, marked by episodes of moving forward and sometimes taking a step backwards. I am self-taught, which means that I myself have worked on my background piece by piece. Seeing that I haven’t had a specific cultural influence to fall back on I don’t have precise rules to follow. I have been practicing photography for at least 40 years and I am progressively more interested in elusive and ambiguous subject matters.

© Edoardo Hahn, Sacramento, USA, 2013

Which authors, not exclusively in the field of photography, have influenced and accompanied you throughout your personal experience in the past and now?

EH: Every photographer has a continuous flow of images in his mind. Besides his own, also those shot by others, from which he repeatedly draws inspiration to create his own photographs, making new associations and rearranging them continuously. My own flow consists of images from the great classics of American color photography from the ‘70s: Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, Fred Herzong. However, others have had an influence too, ranging from Daido Moriyama to Geert Goiris. I have always been very eclectic and have drawn inspiration from contradicting sources.

© Edoardo Hahn, Brest, France, 2007

Let’s talk about your present research in photography. How would you define it? What are your interests? How do your projects develop?

EH: My research is situated in the field of landscape photography, in search of giving meaning to reality around us and the progressive impossibility of that rationalization. I would define photography as a physical and metaphorical journey undertaken by the photographer, who seeks to investigate the singularity and the enigma of that which he observes in front of him, however mundane it might seem. By means of a sort of optical migration following his own gaze the photographer chooses the person, the tree, the stone or the building or whatever he decides to capture. My projects emerge from the collision between that piece of the world that I’ve chosen to photograph and my inner world.

© Edoardo Hahn, ‘Forest’

The debate between analog and digital still produces lively contradictory opinions. What is yours? Which method of photography do you prefer?

EH: It depends on the project. Seeing that I use digital as well as analog and change from one to the other effortlessly I don’t have a method that I prefer. It’s a debate that doesn’t stir a passion in me and that I consider to be a little phony. When I have a potentially interesting idea I pursue it with the means that I believe offer the most opportunities and those depend on the type of project, not on a decision a priori regarding technique.

In 2013 I had the pleasure of meeting you and to curate an exhibition on your work ‘Forest’. At the time I described your photos as “thinking machines”. Could you talk to us about that project.

EH: It concerns a project that stayed with me for many years. The topic was forests, more precisely the way in which they appear to us and how we imagine them (the fantasies that we project on them). Those pictures don’t focus on one specific location or forest, nor are they a representation of nature. They regard a concept of loss of focus and significance. They are like screens or invisible images; there isn’t a means of escape, which allows us to see the image in perspective. There isn’t a before and after, nor a story to tell. It’s a process of immersion. When confronted with a photo of undifferentiated vegetation the onlooker’s mind does not have one spot to fixate on therefore he aims his focus towards himself.

© Edoardo Hahn, ‘Forest’

Recently you have renovated your website. Differing from what we are used to seeing, it allows a slow immersion to which one can surrender without being swallowed, omitting an index and key words, commissioned and personal work are intertwined giving life to your own poetics. Could you talk to us about that choice?

EH: I had a website with a standard layout in which every project was clearly indicated, enclosed in their pretty box, properly wrapped with an unequivocal clear-cut meaning. In my head, however, this didn’t stroke with reality. Images of a project end up in another, which in its turn continues into a third one and so forth. The associations between the images change with time and develop different interpretations. The web is the birthplace of this kind of thinking. During the last years of the '90s I had created a hypertext with quotes, which I had gathered in a database connecting them with expressions from different authors only by means of the logic of the hyperlink. So for me, how we observe the website now is the continuation of this study and this way of thinking.

© Edoardo Hahn, website view

Recently you have published your first monograph 'Landscape Materials’ in the new book series 'Urbanautica Collections’ edited by L'Artiere. We have worked almost 2 years on its creation. You know very well that I’m convinced that this is a matter of a courageous operation that will leave an unequivocal mark on the field of editorial production of landscape photography. Could you talk to us about this experience?

EH: It was without a doubt intense. I have had the opportunity to challenge myself as a producer of images. Everything started with a series of pictures randomly taken in the northern zone of Bay Area in California. This also reflects the process of the project; a drift in a landscape that I didn’t personally know, only through cross references that could come to mind (from books, movies, music, series etc.). Once I returned and took on the responsibility of the project again, I firstly tried to go about it the traditional way, that is one picture after the other in the same dimensions. This, however, didn’t do much for me. At that point you came into play and we started to confront each other while listening to the same music I was listening to during my personal drift in the area. The music has been very important in the construction of the layout, allowing to put a rhythm in the seemingly casual flow. From this sprung a book that implodes and does everything except tell a story. A collection of sketches isolated and juxtaposed events that achieve nothing, pieces that don’t meet and happenings without reason or conclusion. In this sense the author ends up disappearing into the scenery accepting the natural complicatedness and sheer chance of things.

© Book ‘Landscape Materials’, Urbanautica Collections, published by L’Artiere

Just like Nicola Braghieri explains very well in one of the two texts accompanying the volume; the term landscape was originally meant to indicate its representation on canvas not the actual landscape. In other words the concept of representation, of appropriation of a form by the painter or the photographer manifests itself in the semantic nature of the term. In this respect the separate photos lose their value as a testimony of a specific geographic location. Fluctuating in accordance to the mood of the observer they are images reflecting ambiguous coordinates. It’s out of this that the volume’s specific layout is born as a sort of visual trip underlining the difficulty that we today have rationalizing a by now fractal landscape with an indefinite meaning.

© Book ‘Landscape Materials’, Urbanautica Collections, published by L’Artiere

Over the past few months we have reflected on the expositive modality of this project. What are your impressions?

EH: I think that it’s a requirement to follow the laid out path starting with the creation of the website and consequently moving on to the production of the book. The idea that we are working on is that, just like in the book, the images break free from the pages and probably also from our own comprehension. In the expositive modality something similar should happen with the images that break free from the space of the frame and occupy the entire illustrating space. How to make all of that happen will be our next challenge.

BY PETER WATERSCHOOT

© Michel Vaerewijck, ‘Doriane’, 2015

Limits of reason. Fleeting time. Think about digital snapshots sedimenting the bottom of our hard disks; photography gets lost. Unless you go through meticulous archiving. The personal need for a slower photographical approach while rendering the photographical object more valuable for long lasting preservation, propelled Michel Vaerewijck into unica glass plate photography. His unica oeuvre consists of poetic, dreamlike images with floral motives and lingering nudes; an approach associable with e.g. Balthasar Burkhard, an investigation in the causational nature of things.

© Michel Vaerewijck, ‘Ash’, 2015

© Michel Vaerewijck, from the series ‘Sharpness is a lie’

Gradually however, with a quest for substance as a strong driving force, Michel Vaerewijck transcends ‘medium’ as well as ‘subject’. That is to say; it is actually rather more ‘the span’ of the 10 brief minutes in which the silvernitrate migrates into the light-sensitive fluid, which becomes more and more -the true subject- of Michel Vaerewijck’s photography. The axis around which this artist’s field of investigation namely revolves, has become the ‘tapping’ of the intangible itself; a chemically bridged connection between our ‘selves’ and the incomprehensible and multifaceted nature of every personal experience. Point of View: this world and its fleeting time.

© Michel Vaerewijck, from the series ‘Sharpness is a lie’

The glass plates however, do not allow any adding, altering or deleting; light is immediately transformed into matter and structure, which obliges Michel Vaerewijck to plan and prepare his settings, in a strong interaction with his models in order to be fully ready to ‘catch’ their presence in the studio, the gift of their openness, and their action in pose. All while a reflection of light crosses the calm of the dark. A shared communion. A splinter in time. How the photographer relates to the models is of utmost importance here, because it takes repetition, trust and patience to plunge into the world of the dark studio and embark on a mutual research, which is: balancing the model’s input with the photographer’s imagination and expectation.

© Michel Vaerewijck, from the series ‘Sharpness is a lie’

Temporary Vessels. The approach in Michel Vaerewijkck’s oeuvre reveals a philosophical and very human concern. Throughout the oeuvre runs a craving for connection. Michel Vaerewijck has been trained as an engineer and thus has learnt to understand the world as calculable. In his art however, he expresses his insecurities and his intuitive questions on the friction between physics and metaphysics. Most of Michel Vaerewijck’s works are hinting on erotic ‘pulsion’. Some of Michel Vaerewijck’s nudes might be perceived as being at the edge of the pornographic, but, they absolutely aren’t. On the contrary, when looking at the glass plate nudes, you feel as if you were vaguely stroked by love; an intellectual approach on love, transcending materialistic urges. The solitary splendour of the one body (yet perfect always imperfect) seems to remind us of the beauty that lies in creation of forms and ideas. These platonic studio-works present themselves as, one might say, ‘excited contemplations’. The bodies are depictions of temporary vessels carrying sheer vulnerability. The camera descends into the flesh as if it röntgens for the model’s soul, defining the idea of a poetic action; dealing with the unfathomable, the ephemeral within reality. The artist creates the opportunity for the ‘shapeless’ to take shape, and through the mold of careful selection, he makes them accord to his views and ideas, after which -with most sacred gesture and respect- he places these selections in a gallery or art space, where they are meant to connect with the viewers’ psyche. Which establishes a (to his oeuvre very important) triangular relation; specifically: subject-photographer / photographer-viewer / viewer-subject.

© Michel Vaerewijck, from the series ‘Sharpness is a lie’

Sharpness is a lie. Michel Vaerewijck, 2014-2015 –had-, (past tense!) made a clear distinction between analogue photography and digital creation. Digital photography he thought to be a fantastic medium far more resembling to painting or sculpting, nevertheless less suitable for expressing layers of thought and emotion. But! Michel Vaerewijck chose to investigate and to prove himself wrong on this matter. With previous concerns as good guidance, he presents us now, a not so very unlogical shift in method. In his most recent work he really surprises us with a digital U-turn. But, notably, a turn which is in fact a logical continuation of his long-lasting analogue quest. In ‘My father is a Gardener’: (an autobiographical and very personal series), Michel Vaerewijck presents us with introspective and reflective motives using color concept, a digital camera and a customized lens. The lens comes in as most important here. The diffracting lense gives him the opportunity to redirect the registration from the so called ‘visible’ to the non-direct-perceivable.

© Michel Vaerewijck, ‘SPIEGEL im SPIEGEL

As Michel Vaerewijck puts it himself: “sharpness is a lie”. These images do not only mask but also accentuate the encapsulated information. The spectator is engaged to connect the dots, and thus becomes drawn into the image’s subliminal communication.

Hence, once again, the photographer reaches his aim in expressing his ultimate desire, namely: connecting with the world, and connecting with the viewer.
“We always want to figure things out, but in the process we get swallowed”.

URBANAUTICA COLLECTIONS AT PARISPHOTO

Join us for the special vernissage by publisher L’Artiere at Secret Gallery, Paris. We will present the first 2 editions of Urbanautica Collections.

Friday 13th November 2015
from 18:00 to 21:30
Secret Gallery
19 Rue de Varenne
Paris

Facebook event | Urbanautica Collections | Secret Gallery

BY SHEUNG YIU

Paul Yeung is a veteran in photographing social documentary. Working as a photojournalist for Reuters and Hong Kong Economic Times for more than seven years, Paul has covered countless news events, one of those turned into his photo series, ‘Flower Show’. Emulating Martin Parr’s street photography, he took faceless half body portraits of show-goer against a background highly saturated with walls of colourful flowers, turning a mundane photo news feature into a satire on consumerism and salon photography.

© Paul Yeung, from the series ‘Flower Show’

Growing up, have you ever imagined being a photographic artist?

Paul Yeung (PY): I have never thought about what I wanted to be in the future when I was young, let alone being a photographer. My secondary school teachers were surprised when they heard I have become a photojournalist, they had always thought that writing was my interest and strength. They were right, my interest in photography came late in my college years.

© Paul Yeung, from the series ‘Yes Madam, Sorry Ah Sir’

When did you start to see photography as an art form/ a way of expression?

PY: Around 2004 to 2005, I started taking black-and-white photographs with my small GR camera. I would upload them on my blog with some footnotes. It was my little online haven of personal expression and creativity outside of my journalistic work. I started consciously planning photographic projects around 2007 to 2008 while working for a magazine. Inspired by foreign photographers, I started using photography as a creative medium to explore societal motifs. I shot ‘The Collapse of the Fuwa Empire’ in 2008 and ‘The Advertising Billboard is nothing’ in 2009.

Is art school training important to your photography?

PY: Frankly speaking, I was quite disappointed with my postgraduate program as I expected a formal art school training. But in hindsight, I think the flexible syllabus and the intuitive teaching method made me realise that art is unbounded by methodology nor theory. For me, academic training is not as important. On the contrary, it was the exhibitions and short-term seminars I attended, such as Gillian Wearing’s and Taryn Simon’s, that widened my horizon.

Your ‘Flower Show’ series is one of your signature project, an alternative and humoured approach to cover commercial events. What idea did you originally have for the project? Did you expect the project to grow into a solo exhibition in Blindspot Gallery?

PY: Throughout my career, almost every year, I have to do a feature story on flower shows.Two particularly interesting phenomena stands out in years of observation. One, many visitors wore floral patterned clothes to the shows. Two, Many show-goers came to the flower show only to take pictures. Deeply inspired by British photographer Martin Parr, I attempted to cover the event in an humoured and sarcastic approach, capturing consumerism in Hong Kong through my lens. I never thought these photographs would turn into a photo exhibition. That was something I did not expect.

How is your general research process for your projects?

PY: I wanted to make a photojournalistic documentary to chronicle social event but also respond to the transition of photographic art and culture. ’Flower Show’ is a comment on prevailing salon photography aesthetic in Hong Kong. In my work, I magnify the formality of salon photography to ridicule this form of grandiose photographic expression.

I intentionally imitated the personal style, picturesque compositions and presentation format of Lang Jingshan, one of the earliest Chinese photojournalists, embellishing my photos with Chinese calligraphy and flower-related poetry. I later mounted them in Chinese hanging scrolls.

You were a photojournalist for Reuters and Hong Kong Economic Times for more seven years before doing more art-based project, How does your working experience affect your photography?

PY: Years of working in news agencies put me in the frontline of social events and gave me a deeper understanding of the people and the society. They have become the most important sources of inspiration. A lot of my works are informed by the social reality. The core of my work is documentary, with a touch of personal expression and my philosophy on photography. In ‘Flower Show’, I incorporated deadpan photography, a humoured perspective and my commentary on traditional photography. My recent conversation exhibition with Enoch Cheung at Lumenvisum ‘Outside Forces’ (《勾犀科實》) is a project built upon Umbrella Movement, combining my personal opinion of ‘foreign intervention’ and supernatural powers to investigate the authenticity of forensic photography’ in the language of photographic evidence.

Long-term photojournalistic projects are prevalent in China, US and other western countries, why is slow journalism so rare in Hong Kong?

PY: First of all, Hong Kong bustling lifestyle, high living cost and lack of retirement welfare system have cultivated a conservative life philosophy. People tend works hard to keep their regular 9-to-5 job. Photographers grew up in this culture tend to lack patience for long social documentary. Even if they do, the social reality does not allow the time and freedom needed to develop long-term photojournalistic projects when a lot of them can barely make ends meet.

Besides, Hong Kong lacks platform and organisation to help emerging photojournalists. There are only few local residency and fellowship programmes for photographers. One of the more established one would be ‘SoCO’. The local agency advocates social changes through photo documentary. However, having limited resources, programmes are mostly run by tenacious volunteers. Depending on public donation, the organisation have a tendency to run programmes that entertain a more mainstream audience. The organisation has since drifted away from its original aim: to inspire social changes through a ten-year-long photo documentary of children living in poverty.

© Dustin Shum from the series ‘Life and Times’

Hong Kong also lacks audience for this kind of long-term social documentary. I would say the majority of Hong Kongers are rather indifferent to social issues and politics. On the other hand, visual education is often neglected or dismissed entirely, leading to a relatively low demand for photography projects like this.

That being said, there are still plenty of excellent long-term photo documentary in Hong Kong, such as ‘West Kowloon Paradise’ (《西九龍填海區》) by Ducky Tse (謝至德), ‘Homeless’ series (《野宿》) by Lei Jih-sheng (雷日昇), ‘Under Heaven’ (《在天堂之下》) by Chun Wai (秦偉), Dustin Shum (岑允逸)’s ‘Life and Times’(《活一生人》) and ‘We Live’ (《活著》) by Lam Chun Tung (林振東).

What is the current photographic project you are working on? Can you tell us more about it?

PY: I have been photographing mainstream commercial exhibitions food expos, book fairs, wine fairs and flower shows for years. My work explores blind consumerism and a collective lack of critical thinking on the advanced capitalistic society we live in.

I am also working on another documentary about Police Force in Hong Kong. I am currently preparing to publish a photo book and an exhibition at the moment.

© Paul Yeung, from the series ‘Yes Madam, Sorry Ah Sir’

How does Hong Kong inspire you artistically? Living in a city with such dense visual elements, does it influence your aesthetic and artistic thinking?

PY: Hong Kong is essential to my photography. I cannot create outside of it. That is exactly what happened when I was studying in the UK. Yet, I feel I do not fit in the city at times. I would say I am a ‘half-outsider’. I belong to here yet I keep a certain distance from it. You can see this sentiment throughout my work.

For every social issues that I resonate with, I photograph from a relatively personal standpoint. I am drawn to fun, imitation and dark humour. Much like a low budget local film production, I value personal expression over epicness.

NIKI LECK

© Filippo Minelli

Since the Padania Classic’s research started through social media and ended up being presented as a reinterpretation of an “atlas” book, “Atlante dei classici padani”, it would be inadequate to define it as merely photography.

It is intriguing how they advanced the concept of landscape photography, using digital platforms, videos, audio tracks , objects, texts and, of course, photography. They created a hybrid mix that, thanks to its nature, is able to offer a profound portrait of the Padanian territory. At first sight we can feel an aesthetical approach typical of the landscape photography tradition. However, if we take a closer look, a troublesome analysis emerges which reveals subjects such as pollution, decadence, unfinished buildings and so forth. In this way they’re changing the approach by creating a satirical journey that aims to hit you where it hurts. The focus shifted from finding a new visual harmony to the reflection upon ethical, political and environmental issues and their consequences that characterize our time.

© Filippo Minelli

Thus, the focal point of this research revolves around these issues and thoughts, while media, on the other hand, can work as a means to intensify the aspect of contemplation considering that they each have a distinctive skill to offer. For instance, the interest of social media and the website manifests in its relationship with users. They extend an invitation to share as a group and as part of society; it’s not a lone journey. (The point is what and how we want to look, the matter is the approach…) Our objective concerns the appearance and the approach plays an important role in this.

We talked with Filippo Minelli, photographer and conceptual creator of ‘Padania Classic’. How did this project start? Where did you find your “journey companions”? Were you already working together on a kind of research before ‘Padania Classic’?

Filippo Minelli (FM): Some photos date back to 2009 but it formally started in 2011 when the research became more systematic. It started out as joking around with friends, sending them snapshots of weird stuff I found around the area where I was living at the time, a place called Franciacorta. It’s famous for its top quality wines and it’s quite beautiful if you focus your eyes in the right direction. Most of the landscape, however, consists of what you see in the book. Emanuele (the journalist who wrote the texts), Francesco (one of the publishers) and I know each other because we attended the same high school. With Alberto (who took care of the infographics) I spent some years at the Art Academy. Marta Comini, who helped with illustrations, is my wife. She also attended that same high school. The cover picture is 3 Km from my childhood house.

Working as a group, did you notice certain influences from individual perspectives?

FM: We only worked as a group during the editing of the book and it was fantastic. It really was a team effort: I was getting tips about missing locations and subjects. Emanuele Galesi (the journalist who wrote the texts) adjusted his ‘reportage’ style to the ironic narrative of the project and the editors of Krisis Publishing added some details with a different flavor seeing that their approach is more academic. The result made the introspection and slow process totally worth it.

© Filippo Minelli

Looking at your project, it reminds me of the Italian experience of ‘Linea di confine’. How did the landscape photography research change in your opinion? What should for you be the role of photography nowadays?

FM: Well, I might not be the best person to answer this question as I don’t exactly come from a photographic background, but I feel like ‘Linea di Confine’ was very focused on the beauty of each picture and its formal composition. The incredible Italian landscape photography ‘school’ mainly addressed the idealization of landscape. My intention never was to go in that direction because I’m more interested in the archive structure and what role photography plays nowadays.

What intrigues me at the moment is how a democratic use of photography on social media is helping to globally overcome personal issues and to talk about things we didn’t before, for example, subjects related to sexuality or the true aesthetics of crime (via images uploaded in the dark web). Somehow I’m more interested in the process rather than the final result and even though I truly like black and white photography, I also like to question my interests.

© Filippo Minelli

New technologies and Graphic design formed the hybridized ‘Classic Padania’ project, which is not exactly a traditional photography project. Could you explain this a little more?

FM: Again, not coming from a photography background, this is a crucial aspect for me. The project started simultaneously with the spreading of photography online and the conceptualization of a weird use of language to emphasize the absurdity of the landscape. It also developed into a fake touristic agency with its own website. In real life it started showing up with booths at fairs and distributing fake promotional material. Additionally, we are working on organizing guided bus-tours in the weirdest areas of Padania (a sort of conference on wheels). So the aspect of performance is also key to the approach of ‘Padania Classics’. Publishing a 720 pages book on the subject was a funny way of keeping the project ironic too. It’s an absurd concept to have a book about disasters in the same size as editions on history of the Arts or architectural styles.

© Filippo Minelli

We were all inspired by Eugenio Turri’s definitions and analysis of North Italian landscape and by The Sochi Project which is a fantastic reportage. "Learning From Las Vegas" also played a role during the final phase but we only realized all of this when the book was printed.

Tell us about the reactions you recorded while developing and showing your project…

FM: It usually depends on the context but it ranges from a deep sense of sadness to outbursts of laughter. Being under the impression that the touristic agency showing Padania to foreigners was real, one old man from the separatist party Lega Nord even cried talking about his past as an activist.

© Filippo Minelli

And finally, how do you think the ‘Padania Classic’ experience might evolve in the future?

FM: Right now we are overwhelmed with presentations of the book and the calendar doesn’t allow for much planning. However, what’s sure is that we’ll start the bus tours I told you about and that we’ll have a comprehensive exhibition of the project in Germany in 2016. We are also working on a plan to fund controlled implosions of buildings and the realization of a new commercial mall covering a vast agricultural area.

Info on the book ‘Padania Classics’ published by Krisis Publishing available from here.

GEORGES SALAMEH

© Alexis Vasilikos, ‘All in’

Since you have no statement on your website, please tell us a bit about yourself and which directions is your work taking you the last couple of years?

Alexis Vasilikos (AV): Hello my name is Alexis Vasilikos and I like to play with images, I work mostly with photography and I’ve been doing it for the last 20 years. My work explores my day to day life and it is based on spontaneity and improvisation. What I like to do the last couple of years is to mix all sorts of imagery and make a form of editing which looks like the Greek salad. I don’t try nor am I interested in telling any story through my images, I’m more interested in experiencing what is present when there is no story in the mind, when the consciousness is empty of content, and in this sense I see my practice as a form of meditation.

Although there are storylines behind some of my series, generally speaking my attitude is: «Forget about the story and let the mind merge in the seeing». Why burden oneself with thinking, when you can just see?

© Alexis Vasilikos, ‘Yoga’

How much are editing and randomness an engine of the process of defining your photography?

AV: Editing is the final piece, the composition. So lately I tend to see as “works” the edits rather than the single images, and because I don’t see images as something fixed, I continuously edit the same material over and over again , in this way the images are always fresh. Before I used to play with large quantities of images and so the edits I was doing had 120-180 images, now I ’m doing edits that contain up to 36-37 images which is the number of the 135 mm film, I thought that putting a limit would be interesting.

I call the way I edit “energetic editing” because the energy of the image is the main element around which the images unfold and become a flow. What I do basically is to decontextualize the images completely and then create a new context which is based on the inner dynamic of the images themselves and their interaction. So yes definitely editing is very important, it is at the core of my practice. "Randomness" is not a concept that I feel particularly close to, I tend to see all forms as expressions of one single principle, and randomness implies that there are at least two kinds of causes.

© Alexis Vasilikos, ‘Back to Nothing ( India 2004 -2015 )’

From the titles of your works (‘Yoga’, ‘Back to Nothing’, ‘Intersections’, ‘Behind the Veil of Time’, ‘Google Pairs’…) or even the content itself or the use of black &white and color, there is always this recurrent feeling and reference to 2 different worlds or two dimensions of time, the now & the beyond… as if every photograph is a link or a conversation with both. How do you approach this notion of duality and can you speak more specifically about your latest series ‘Google Pairs’?

AV: I don’t know about 2 different worlds or two dimensions of time, that would be like “stepping” into the pictures and speak from there, as if they had a fixed meaning and that is something I’d prefer not to do. There are people who are very good at speaking about images but I don’t like to interpret images or attribute meaning to them, if I’ve learned one thing from photography, this is the flimsy nature of phenomena, and photographs are highly flimsy phenomena.

If photographs are conversing with something it’s with impermanence, maybe this is why I continuously edit the same images, I want to keep them in touch with the ever-changing, I don’t want to let them grow roots in the mind, it feels much more alive this way than to say: this is about this or that, which is just a construct anyway.

© Alexis Vasilikos, ‘All in’

No! I’d rather say : I don’t know what it is about , it’s just how it appears in this moment , let’s see how it will unfold…
Rumi puts it beautifully when he says:

«Do you think I know what I’m doing?
That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?
As much as a pen knows what it’s writing,
Or the ball can guess where it’s going next.»

© Alexis Vasilikos, ‘All in’

Duality is the mother illusion, on one hand everything we perceive and experience is based on duality and on the other hand when it becomes psychological and it takes the form a “me”, we suffer from it. And so we are called to transcend it, and this is where the journey of Yoga (union) begins, all of life takes place in the cooking pot of Yoga. It’s a kind of divine hoax, because it doesn’t really exist and yet it’s very rare to meet a human being who is completely out of it, or more precisely who has realized that one is never in it. At a more direct level one can ask: Where is duality beyond the realm of thought? And what about the awareness of duality, is it part or apart from duality?

© Alexis Vasilikos, ‘Google Pairs’

In “Google Pairs” I observe the results of my name on the google images search engine over a period of two years, and I keep note in the form of diptychs. I don’t know if this work has to do with duality, it’s very fresh to speak about it. Obviously when you have 2 images next to each other there is a duet. While I was doing it, I was thinking about the collective editing that takes place in the internet and the nature of the “I” as a product of this collective editing.

Tell us about your last exhibition ‘Myths & Rifts’, in London, and how your work came to be associated with a more political content and what Greece is going through the last few years? How you define “political” in your work and how do you view what is called Crisis?

AV: I was invited to this show by the people of the KK OUTLET Gallery in London and my work was placed in this exhibition as the opposite side of the crisis, the other shore. On one side was the work of Stefanos Andreadis which was directly associated with the crisis and on the other hand they had my work which was placed as that which is not affected by the crisis, the magical side of existence. They made this show as a form of dialogue between these two aspects of life. Political in my work is …, I don’t know! Crisis is the ego, as long as we are under its influence we suffer, therefore we are in crisis.

At a social level it may seem more complex because we are talking about the collective ego, but the bottom line is the same, each and every one of us at some point is pushed from within to go beyond this ego - mind and its limitations. The good news here is the testimony of the Sage which clearly states that the ego is only an idea, devoid of any reality, therefore from this point of view the crisis is a stage of a greater possibility we have and not a finality.

Since you are also an editor, tell us more about the adventure of Phases magazine. What do you think about contemporary photography?

AV: Phases Mag started quite spontaneously as a meeting between myself and Jerome Montagne and it grows in a rather organic way, it is a form of dialogue around beauty in fine art photography. After 3 years of online presence we are almost ready to move to the print world.

About the contemporary photography, well if it’s good it’s not just contemporary, in general my view on art is a bit classical. I see beauty as an expression of the timeless and art as a fundamental mirror on top of which the timeless is reflected.

Lately I appreciate more and more the masters, maybe it’s a sign I’m getting a bit old. Edward Steichen, Saul Leiter, Andre Kertesz, Luigi Ghirri these are just a few whose work I enjoy deeply, of course there are many more, as for the contemporary ones, have a look at Phasesmag it’s full of beautiful contemporary photography. Also something worth exploring is the Greek contemporary fine art photography scene, I have a feeling that it’s quite rich and not very much known, if you consider the fact that there is no real market for fine art photography in Greece it becomes even more interesting what is happening here.

What about your new book, the series ‘All in’ and why did you choose to self-publish it?

AV: ‘All in’ is an extension of the dialogue we have with Jerome on Phasesmag, only in this case it took the form of a book and the focus was on my work, this is the first from a series of books we are planning to publish as “Phases Editions”. It’s a freestyle edit of 36 images in an edition of 100 with a very minimalist design made by Jerome. You can see the entire edit here. We chose to self-publish it because self-publishing gave us complete freedom to make it the way we wanted.

© Alexis Vasilikos, images of the book ‘All in’

What are your future projects, travels, explorations, collaboration…?

AV: I don’t like to plan so much, to just be is enough, the rest comes on its own!

BY DIETER DEBRUYNE

© Pauline Mikó, Buried Photographs from ‘A Project for Later’

Tell us about your approach to photography. How would you describe your personal research in general?

Pauline Mikó (PM): My approach of photography is rather personal. I use the photographic medium as a way to document time. Through experimentation with film negatives and burying printed images in metal boxes, I analyze the effects of time and natural elements on photographs. I also collect elements that I either photograph or scan in order to enlarge them and give them another scale, another importance: I use photography to magnify found, precious, specific objects. To me, all my images are dots forming some sort of time line: Connected, they draw a fragmented and personal story.

© Pauline Mikó, ‘In Statu Nascendi’

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

PM: Nowadays, we are flooded with images. It’s interesting to see that at the end of the day, all the photographs we see fade away in a massive sea of images.
It’s getting harder to make a difference between what’s art and what isn’t, as the boundaries between Instagram shots, framed photographs exhibited in galleries, self-portraits and selfies, etc. are slowly disappearing.

Tell us about your latest project ‘A Project for Later’.

PM: In 2003, at the age of twelve, I buried a metal box in the garden of a friend. The box contained two photographs and a letter I wrote to my future self.
Ten years later, the box was dug out of the ground and its content was revealed. In 2013, I decided to start burying new boxes. So far there are five boxes buried in different places of the world.

© Pauline Mikó, ‘A Project for Later’

Each box contains printed photographs, texts and small objects. They all tell a personal, yet fragmented and partly fictional story. I keep track of every buried box in a journal, using pieces of evidence, notes and pictures, names of locations, geographic coordinates and descriptions, in order to be able to find the boxes back in the future, eventually. There is a great chance I might never find these boxes back: they could get lost, be found by others, stolen, destroyed, or I myself could forget about them. These boxes are like memories, only time will tell if they will last. I call this project ‘A Project for Later’ and consider it a constant dialogue between my past, present and future self.

© Pauline Mikó, ‘A Project for Later’

Your book has certain feel to it, meaning some pages have a structure; was this intended to?

PM: When you say ‘feel’, are you referring to the choice of paper? The graphic designer (Caroline Wolewinski) and I wanted to have a beautiful and textured paper for this book. I don’t know if you noticed but there’s actually two different papers in the book. It’s actually the same paper type (Multi Design) but they have different weights. The one used for the parallel series of black and white matter images is slightly heavier, thicker.

Book - A Project for Later, Text and Photographs by Pauline Mikó, Design by Caroline Wolewinski

With this choice we wanted to break the reading pace of the viewer. Multi Design is a very textured, dense paper. Our desire was to obtain an intensely dark, deep black on the side of all the images of the facsimile with some texture, encouraging to be grabbed, touched, felt. Another interesting aspect of Multi Design is that it allows transparency, which was important for the lighter parts of the images.

© Pauline Mikó, The Rock from ‘A Project for Later’

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

PM: My former mentor Dirk Braeckman. Japanese photographer Daisuke Yokota. Matthew Brandt and Stephen Gill.

Three books of photography that you recommend?

PM: - Found Photos in Detroit by Arianna Arcara and Luca Santese (Centura Publish, 2012)
- Site/cloud by Daisuke Yokota (G/P gallery, 2013)
- Five Dark Dream Slow by Melissa Catanese (The Ice Plant, 2012)

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

PM: The last show I saw was at Tate Modern in London early October. I was mesmerized by Gerhard Richter’s large-scale paintings exhibited in the permanent collection.

© Gerhard Richter, courtesy Cantz Verlag. Photo: Benjamin Katz. Gerhard Richter in his studio, photographed by Benjamin Katz (1987)

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

PM: I recently self-published a book entitled “A project for later” which kept me busy over the last month. I’m currently preparing a group show around the theme of memory together with a new collective I’m part of (Unfold Kollektive with painter Falcone, videographers R’m Aharoni and Eva Giolo and photographer Jeroen Vranken). The show opens on November 19th 2015 at Braam Art Gallery in Brussels and will run until December 3rd 2015. Other than that, I’m still experimenting with film negatives and preparing new boxes to bury.

BY TALIA SMITH

© Mike Read from the series ‘Boundless Plains’

Tell me about your approach to photography? Your process and general concepts…

Mike Read (MR): I’ve previously shot a lot of street photography but found when I wanted to build a body of work it felt more like a lot of single images rather than a cohesive series so developing my concepts has been a big focus lately.

Through both family history and political beliefs I’ve got a keen interest in migration, which has been a common thread in my work. While the ‘Boundless Plains’ series takes that at a much more obvious level, looking at refugees and asylum seekers in Indonesia, my earlier street work was always about people moving through the frame. At it’s most basic definition migration is about movement from one place to another – I’m interested in it at both the micro and macro levels.

With ‘Boundless Plains’, because I’m based in Melbourne and the series is shot in Indonesia, the process has involved making numerous trips to Indonesia to shoot. It gives me time to remove myself from the experience while I take time to scan the film, sit with the images and identify where the series is going and what gaps need to be filled before returning to shoot more.

© Mike Read from the series ‘Boundless Plains’

Your ‘Boundless Plains’ project is beautiful, the images are unabashedly honest in the way you have composed them and the stories you are telling. What drew you to this project?

MR: The project came about as a result of general despair of longstanding policies towards asylum seekers and refugees from successive Australian Governments and, more specifically, the Abbott Government’s Stop The Boats policy.

I wanted to know what happened to these people who would have been getting on the boats towards Australia. I found out about one town in the Bogor region, about 90 minutes south of Jakarta, with a large asylum seeker/refugee population. Originally it served as a temporary stopping point while waiting for a smugglers phone call to inform them a boat was ready to leave. Now that the boats have (mostly) stopped, asylum seekers and refugees in Indonesia face a wait of upwards of five years as they go through the formal asylum process.

© Mike Read from the series ‘Boundless Plains’

The project is still in its infancy, shot over two trips so far, there are a lot of different aspects that keep me itching to get back and explore in more depth. I want to know more about the relative freedoms – for some single people it’s their first chance to date, for many girls it’s the first time they can play sport. These are things that just weren’t possible in their homelands. But these apparent freedoms sit alongside the fact that they’re unable to work or go to university, that police could round them up or that their refugee claims could be rejected. This constant uncertainty is something I want to explore along with the way it all unfolds in a very lush green tropical setting, which for those from more arid climates like Afghanistan can act as a constant reminder of their displacement.

Can you give me a bit of background on the project and also the outcome (the exhibition at RMIT)

MR: The first time I visited Bogor I only had three days and the result of this was a short series called ‘Enjoy Your Holiday’, the name coming from the tagline of a magazine ad found on the floor of an asylum seekers house, featuring a photo of a happy smiling white family on a beach. The problem with being there so briefly, hearing their stories and photographing these people then leaving was that I felt it reduced them to victims, they became only what had happened to them in their past. It creates a dangerous line where if you’re not careful you invite the viewer to lower these people in a way that they can feel sympathy but not empathy. This was something I wanted to try to avoid, to not reinforce this idea of refugees as some un-relatable “other” to be feared.

© Mike Read from the series ‘Enjoy Your Holiday’

When I returned in December/January and started on ‘Boundless Plains’ I spent six weeks living with a group of guys from Afghanistan. The first four weeks was spent sharing meals, talking, playing sport and, most importantly, sitting around doing absolutely nothing with them.

It wasn’t really until the last two weeks that I started shooting anything. I wanted to first gain an understanding of their lives in Indonesia – Obviously I’m never going to know the full extent of what they’ve been through, but it was important to spend time stripping away any of my preconceived ideas and assumptions.

I made another visit in April – the work that has been produced between December – April was shown as an exhibition at RMIT University in Melbourne in August this year. I had submitted the project in an application for the RMIT VE Photo-imaging Graduate in Residence programme and was lucky enough to be one of two people selected for it. The programme is open to graduates of the course and provides access to equipment, mentorship and, at the end of the twelve months, an exhibition. The benefit of this was that I was forced to think very early on about the direction the series was taking and take stock, somewhat, so that I’d have something cohesive for the exhibition.
That being said, the exhibition was only an initial outcome for the work and I see myself shooting it for a few more years, eventually taking the form of a book.

© Mike Read from the series ‘Enjoy Your Holiday’

Do you have any plans to return to Indonesia and the people you met?

MR: I’m hoping to be back there before the end of the year – before wet season kicks in too much, but it’s dependent on a few things falling in to place. As it’s an ongoing project it’s important for me to be able to get there as regularly as possible to keep appearances up and maintain the relationships I’ve built and visit the friends I’ve made.

Can you tell me about any projects you are planning for the near future?

MR: Besides trying to get back to Indonesia, I’m starting to put together a concertina book inspired by a New York Times article titled ‘The Dream Boat’. The concept is taken from the opening paragraphs that detail a nighttime journey by asylum seekers in the back of a truck traveling from Jakarta to the southern coast of Java. Think lots of black nothingness fleetingly interrupted by passing the lights of billboards, freeway overpasses and moonlit trees.

Who would be your top 5 creative inspirations – can be artist or writer or musician

MR: Paul Kelly – Singer-songwriter whose story telling ability provides an audible history of Australian life.
Alex Webb – Master of composition, light, colour, everything.
Trent Parke – In some ways, the photographic Paul Kelly.
Lee Grant – When I started studying photography I was just interested in taking photos and was pretty ignorant to other photographers. Her series ‘Belco Pride’ came out around this time and one of my lecturers showed it to the class, it was one of my first introductions to a considered body of work.
Albert Camus – Especially ‘The Plague’ and his exploration of exile and separation.

How do you feel that your commercial or commissioned work fits in with your documentary/art practice?

MR: I don’t do a whole lot of commercial work but when I do I first make sure that the client and I are the right match before taking anything on. Essentially, they know my documentary/art practice and they’re coming to me because it matches their needs – I rarely chase commercial work myself.

I pay my bills by working a few days a week in an office – it’s not overly exciting but it’s steady and allows me to create my personal work without busting my arse going after any commercial job that might come my way.

That being said, I do really enjoy commissioned work when it’s a good match and we share the same vision.

© Mike Read from the series ‘The Way’

What is the difference for you with your ‘projects’ and ‘short stories’?

MR: I’m terrible at website maintenance but they were kind of just categories that I put on there with better intentions than execution. The projects sub-heading is meant to be longer-term or ongoing bodies of work, where as most of the short stories were shot in a day or so. The short stories section was meant to be more of a rolling selection of sets of images with new additions to it regularly but it just hasn’t happened that way and I’ve let it slide while I plan a complete new website.

Your ‘short stories’ series called The Edge of Town is a real departure aesthetically from most of your other work, it does not feature figures but is more focused on the patterns and language of the built environment. Is this something you will build on or is it the stories of the people that drive your work more?

MR: In 2012 I was awarded The Pool Grant, which helped me travel to Spain and create images along towns and cities that the Camino de Santiago pilgrim path goes through, for the series ‘The Way’.

‘The Edge of Town’ was shot during this trip and only came about during the image selection process.

© Mike Read from the short series ‘The Edge of Town’

Prior to that trip I’d only ever really shot street photographs, normally on busy intersections, and suddenly I was going through all these small towns that were void of people. The economy was collapsing and youth unemployment was huge, causing many people to leave these smaller towns – The lack of people in these images is indicative of that.

At this point, the stories of people are much more a driving force for my work. Prior to ‘Boundless Plains’ the only images I would take of people was when I was shooting street, which was a one-sided exchange.

I had never really shot portraits. I wasn’t comfortable with the interaction and the vulnerability of the process and if I wasn’t comfortable with that, as the photographer, then what chance would the sitter have!

I’ve started to get over that and have become more comfortable shooting portraits, which has coincided with me both slowing down my shooting process and being able to spend more time with the subjects before hand. I’m still making mistakes and learning a lot but the stories I’m working on are about people, so I need to be comfortable with them and them with me.

BY DIETER DEBRUYNE

© Helio León, ‘Into the Purple Room’

Tell us about your approach to photography. How would you describe your personal research in general?

Helio León (HL): I photograph what I experience, what is close to me, which is a way of questioning reality and myself. I look for people, spaces and situations that trigger something personal to me, close to my fantasies and my nightmares, to the subconscious. I believe in the power of photography to reflect something deeper and unexplainable that comes from there and can’t be seen at first sight.

Then there’s the process of editing and working with the pictures, when rhythm and fiction appear, the possibility to make fantasy take form and express what I feel about the world, my inner violence, what I love. What I want to say can’t be said with words.

© Helio León, ‘Into the Purple Room’

How did your research evolve in time? Starting from your first shots to your work now?

HL: I got dragged into photography as a way to document my life, this was when I was a teenager. I wanted to experience as much as possible and had the need to document it. Photography seemed the perfect medium for this. The idea of capturing things as I was seeing them became an obsession, not quite healthy, I didn’t understood yet the way to find a balance between capturing and living at the same time.

Now is quite different, more conscious: I dig, I look for my reality, I get involve with what I photograph. There’s a moment when I start and a moment when I finish. It can last for days, hours, seconds. My drive and reasons are only slightly different, the main ones where always present, but I think with time I’m getting closer to them.

There’s a clear moment when things changed radically for me, when the innocence was finally lost. It was after things got messed up with sexuality, identity, drugs and death. That opened the doors in my mind and made me get closer to what I had always wanted to photograph, to what I need to say. Now I’m more and more obsessed with the idea of the kid, that what we were, what we experienced in childhood can always be seen in the pictures, in any work we are doing, in our behavior. This is the most important thing for me now, what I’m researching at the moment in relation with my troubled feelings regarding home and family.

© Helio León, ‘Into the Purple Room’

Tell us about your latest project ‘Into the Purple Room’.

HL: It is centered mainly in Istanbul -but not only- and the emotions this city triggers in me, the spaces and people that mean something to me there, the haunted neighborhoods, the wounds of the city and my own. I’ve been long periods of time in Istanbul in two very different moments of my life. Both times I felt haunted by it, a strong melancholia and excitement, a big need to experience, to get in. There’s something there that feels so magical and familiar to me, that makes physical what is in my guts, as if I had been there before. I think there’s some relation with this and the historical violence in the city, as well as its bright, very rich, cultural past. Both things are still very alive. There is also my lust as and my conflicts with home and intimacy as subjects, my own violence, a feeling of horror.

One of the main characters in the series is Eflatun and her room. She was like a mirror to me in many ways, too many connections. The other one is Sevda Yilmaz, a transvestite who is also a writer and activist. She used to talk to me about the secret past of the city. It was as if she was part of my family.

© Helio León, Into the Purple Room

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

HL: It’s nice to be able to access so much work and information through the net as well as having the possibility to connect with other artists so easily, I just can’t deny that. Sometimes I find amazing things and very inspiring works that I probably wouldn’t have find otherwise, as I really like to research online, the same way I get lost in a physical library. But it can be frustrating also in some ways. The experience of looking at a photograph in a computer screen has no comparison with looking at the images printed.

© Helio León, Into the Purple Room

We can feed endlessly our lust of images thanks to internet -and thankfully not everything is there-, as well as we can create and look to a lot more images a lot faster thanks to technology now and I think this will probably make evolve our understanding and capability to look at images and create them. I can feel this already, I’ve accumulated thousands and thousands of images, my own images, in my archive. A few weeks ago I was visiting a photographer a few generations older than me in Istanbul, Elio Montanari, he still only shoots in analog (that according to him should be called chemical photography). He showed me his archive, with all the physical files full of negatives, like a library, and we calculated there were about 100.000 photographs there taken in the course of a few decades. He confessed to me that he would had like to start younger and to have accumulated the double of pictures at list. I was thinking about it. I have probably taken that amount of pictures already, all of them are in hard-drives that can be stored in the space of less than a small drawer. It’s getting more and more natural for me to go through thousands of images when I’m in the process of editing while in the past I really felt overwhelmed by it.
Even though I love “chemical” photography, digital is my medium now, and I embrace it, is part of me and it has made my work evolve.

© Helio León, Into the Purple Room

Internet seems like a monster that devours everything. So there’s the positive side and the other side that is not that nice and is a direct consequence. Many jobs have almost disappear because of it, many magazines have died… which is sad, but there’ll always be ways to make it happen I’m sure.

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

HL: Momo Okabe’s work has made me understand mine better. I feel very connected too with the work by Hideka Tonomura. There are many others, like Masahima Fukase or Michael Ackerman, and of course, Nan Goldin.
The poems and fiction by Roberto Bolaño have been a great influence to me. Also the work by Caravaggio and his approach, as well as Egon Schiele.
I admire the work by Janet Cardiff, ‘The Walk Book’ is amazing. And many many films, they were my first photographic influence. I’m quite obsessed with cinema.

© Momo Obake, Bible

Three books of photography that you recommend?
HL: - ‘Ray’s a laugh’, by Richard Billingham
- ‘Bible’ by Momo Okabe
- ‘Heaven’ by Paul Kooiker
All very strong, inspiring, and heartbreaking books.

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

HL: ‘Foreign Bodies’ curated by Pawel Szypulski last Krakow Photomonth made a big impression to me. Very academic, while at the same time expressing a lot of rage against the history of colonialist patriarchal society through photography. Very well articulated, subtle, strong, engaging and emotional. I loved it.

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

HL: I’m working on a project about my girlfriend, investigating her past and mine and our emotions regarding home and family. Photographing our daily life and also her family archive. I’ve been working on this for two years already and now is finally starting to take shape. There are other ideas and sketches boiling at the moment in my head.

This year I also started the photographic/drone performance project ‘Sea of Okhotsk’, with three drone musicians. It’s like a ritual and it involves the projection and distortion of photographs, chanting, screaming, spoken word and drone music. It’s very cathartic. The 19th of November we’ll perform in Dublin Live Art Festival in an old church in DIT Grangegorman. I can’t wait to perform and project my pictures there.

This is a video of our last performance during Cork Photo:

© Helio León, Sea of Okhotsk - In Exile

I also want to investigate more exhibition possibilities. At some point I would like to do a big show, with photographs, projections, videos and sound, in different rooms with very low light, like an installation labyrinth. It’s something that it’s been there in my mind since a while now.

How do you see the future of photography in general evolve? And where do you place yourself in this future?

HL: Photography is just a baby, there are many things to come, hopefully more wilderness in the approach, more capability to communicate, to move people, to get more personal and dig in reality. Just think in artists like Giotto, his work was amazing, but there was still so much to explore and to say with painting those days. The same with photography. There are many Renaissances still to come, if the world doesn’t end before.

KLAUS FRUCTHNIS

© Marc Lathuillière, Studio Tang Daw

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

Marc Lathuillière (ML): There is not much to say about the first pictures I took as a teenager with a camera offered by my grandfather. It turned a bit more serious when I became a travel writer, being frequently sent on assignment with press photographers in France and abroad. That’s how I learned the basics, trying to imitate them with my non professional camera. I thought I was not very good, so I gave up for a while. But in a sense I went on practicing photography without a camera. After all, coupled with our eyes, the brain is the best camera obcsura. Traveling with photographers, I was witnessing how they framed the world, and took part in that construction as I was often assisting them.

The first important shot I remember is witnessing a “wrong” picture being taken. I was with a photographer in Quebec, doing a story at a forest lodge in the winter. To preserve the food, the staff was using ice chainsawed from a nearby frozen lake. The photographer asked one of the guys, dressed like a trapper, to perform the same action with a huge antique hand saw he had seen adorning the reception cabin. I told my friend: “You know very well French Canadians hate to be perceived as backward lumbermen. This is exactly what this picture will tell our readers”. The image of course was published, its caption saying it was the normal way to cut ice in this part of the world.

Witnessing how press and commercial photography was building cultural identities and reinforcing national if not racial stereotypes, I developed a problematic relationship with this practice.

© Marc Lathuillière, Anakot (The Fortune Teller)

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

ML: The real start was my stay in Seoul in 2003-2004, where I was working as a journalist for the South Korean radio. Overwhelmed by the culture shock, my creative answer was not verbal. It should have been, since I was still a writer. But no, the real reply to those jingoist clichés aired by my employer was to use the power of images. During a one week vacation, I crossed South Korea on a small 125 cc bike, and developed a photographic game meant to unravel those cultural stereotypes. When I came back to Seoul, I had my first series, called ‘Transkoreana’, which was subsequently published by a Korean house, Noonbit, and shown in the country, in Hong Kong and later in France.

Cultural shifts play a major role in the way I conceive my projects. The next one, ‘Musée national’ (National Museum) stems from the reversed culture shock I experienced when I came back to France in 2004. I had lived in Asian fast movies societies, and found myself back in a country where people cling to their heritage, resisting world changes in order to preserve what they perceive as a “French identity”. I realized we were progressively turning our country into one huge open air museum. To the delight of foreign tourists, of course. Coupled with the invasive use of digital photography, tourism is a truly modern phenomenon that deeply affects societies, and the way they perceive themselves and mutate accordingly. For National Museum, I ask the French I meet around the country to wear an identical mask, and take their portrait in a context relating them to a heritage. Defacing and freezing the subjects, the mask casts these daily surroundings in an estranging light, revealing the stereotypes upon which we build our lives.

© Marc Lathuillière, On the Carlton Beach - Christian Toussaint, Producer, Cannes Film Festival (Alpes-Maritimes). Courtesy Galerie Binôme

Mirroring this long term project, I developed another one called ‘Fluorescent People’ between 2007 and 2010 in Northern Thailand. Working in immersion in a remote village of the Lisu hill tribe, I confronted its inhabitants with strange installations of colorful mass consumption products. I used pink balls, jelly pots or PVC pipes – materials of a fast changing lifestyle – to design a kind of outer space in which they posed in their brightly colored clothing. A critical rereading of ethnical photography, these clichés intent to deconstruct how the genre assigns minorities to a timeless past, a mental frame akin to a reservation.

Can you tell us more about your biggest project, ‘Musée National’, and your collaboration with Michel Houellebecq.

ML: It’s a project I have been working on for the last 11 years. I have taken the masked portrait of more than 500 people in around thirty departments across the country: farmers, politicians, winemakers, fashion designers, village butchers, museum curators and even a few celebrities like Nouvelle vague moviemaker Agnès Varda. I thought it might come to an end when it was published last year: the book, conceived with Editions de La Martinière, contains 160 photographs, and it’s a pretty good synthesis. But in fact its publication was for me a liberation. It took four years to give it birth – an overdue pregnancy, really – and I restrained myself from adding too many portraits to the series. I now feel free to go on taking pictures of regions or cities – like Arles – or functions – like the literary jury, with Frédéric Beigbeder, president of the “Prix de Flore”, wearing the mask – I have not addressed in my typology before.

© Marc Lathuillière, Book ‘Musée National’, Editions de La Martinière

The recognition the series has achieved lately owes much to Michel Houellebecq’s support. We met three years ago, when I got in touch with him for a group show in which, as a curator, I wanted to include three of his photographs; though he is a writer, he has a very intriguing and exciting use of photography. The show never took place (the gallery who commissioned it closed down and I’m still looking for another venue), but preparing it gave us ample occasion to confront our views on France, deindustrialization and tourism. Though many sociologists have already analyzed this process we call “museification”, Michel, in his 2010 novel ‘The Map and the territory’ and myself with ‘National Museum’ are to my knowledge the two only artists or writers who gave this concept so much thought. There are also similarities between some of the works developed by Jed Martin, the fictional artist whose life is told in the novel, and my own. These common grounds led Michel to write a text on National Museum, called ‘A remedy to the exhaustion of being’ (it has just been translated into English). It subsequently became the foreword of my book. Under the supervision of Valérie Fougeirol, one of the three curators of last year’s Month of Photography in Paris, we also join forces in the double exhibition called ‘Le produit France’ (The French Product). While I curated his first large solo show of photographs, ‘Before Landing’, at the Pavillon Carré de Baudouin, he supported mine, ‘Musée national’, at Galerie Binôme with his writing. With the support of Gares & Connexions SNCF, the branch in charge of stations at the French national railways, some of our photographs were also displayed in Paris stations, Gare de Lyon and Gare d’Austerlitz respectively.

© Marc Lathuillière, The Quality Meat - Alain Daire, Butcher, Cunlhat (Puy-de-Dôme). Courtesy Galerie Binôme

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

ML: One of the main drives is my curiosity for cultural systems: foreign ones and those I originate from. Trying to understand them, I usually come across stereotypes that bend and distort our perception. So you could say I’m a stereotype hunter. I experiment different visual approaches to unravel and deconstruct them, trying out new strategies for each project.

Generally speaking, my main method consists in modifying our usual perception of a photograph through the addition of extra layers of reading. They can be intrusions inside the image itself – a simple mask in ‘National Museum’, or entire installations in ‘The Fluorescent People’ – but also reflection effects in the way I show them. In my most recent body of work, called ‘Dispersions’, some photographs of suburban sceneries – a contemporary cliché - are mounted on mirrors, others projected on a mirror ball. These effects are attempts to dissolve visual boundaries, but also, symbolically, to suggest a critical approach of the influence of political powers on the making of territory photographs.

© Marc Lathuillière, The Sky Fire Tree

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

ML: Digital capture and post-treatment make photography one of the most fascinating field of experimentation in contemporary art. It is also shaking up the certainties of old style documentary photography. We knew it before, but now it can’t honestly be denied: what we capture with a camera is not the reality. Just a reality. A framed and static one.

Social networks are also an exciting new field for the artists: they are new extensions to the body in which images play the main role, mixing memories and fictional projections. I actually intend to launch a project using one of the most recent mobile phone networking applications, looking for partners to develop it. New practices in social networking should anyhow be studied and apprehended with a certain degree of distrust. They triggered a rocketing inflation in the use of photographs. And as photography is shaping the world in a distorted way, fostering its commodification, this evolution does also concern me.

Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras, techniques and format?

ML: I usually shoot with a digital reflex camera. The brand is Japanese. 24 x 36 is my preferred format, but I would love to see one of those camera makers develop a professional reflex allowing the use of the 16:9 format: it’s cinematic and close to the human eye.

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

ML: I am certainly influenced by some of my artist friends, if not by their work at least by their dedication. But as far as the non living ones are concerned, my first visual influence is Quattrocento: when I was studying in London, I would drop by every week at the National Gallery to look at the amazing way Mantegna, Bellini or Botticelli painted skies and perspectives. It is the light of a lost paradise. As I did my first photographer steps in Asia, I was also probably influenced by the colors and playful protocols of contemporary Asian photography, by Kacey Wong (the ‘Drift City’ series) or Manit Sriwanichpoom, to name only the artists I met.

© Kacey Wong, Drift City (Munich, Germany), 2006

Social portraiture is also high in the list of my references, and I have a great respect for August Sander, Arnold Newman, Jeff Wall and Martin Parr. But for their radical and critical approach of photography, Alfredo Jaar and Joan Fontcuberta’s works are for me the truly quintessential ones.

I should also mention that a lot of my sources of inspiration are negative ones: contemporary photography produces its own stereotypes, often showing me the highways I must avoid.

Three books of photography that you recommend?

ML: All the books published by Joan Fontcuberta. The others are more books on photography.

‘La photographie contemporaine’ by Michel Poivert: a very bright and broad approach on today’s photography, but I’m not sure it’s been translated into English. If not, it should definitely be. More of an essay, and mostly focused on some big names of the contemporary scene, ‘Why photography matters as art as never before’ by Michael Fried, develops a theory on the importance of “absorption” in portraiture that is as exciting as it is doubtful, making it really thought-provoking. Writings by Roland Barthes, Rosalind Krauss and French philosopher Clément Rosset have also nurtured me a lot.

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

ML: ‘After Eden’, the most extensive exhibition of the Walther Collection ever, is presently shown at the Maison Rouge in Paris: a must see for those who will be here for Paris Photo. More than 800 photographs are displayed – only one part of this major private collection. The dialogue between the German-American collector, Artur Walther, highly serial and conceptual, and African curator Simon Njami, more focused on cultural studies, makes it very rich in meanings and highly inspirational.

© La Maison Rouge, Après Eden / La Collection Walther

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

ML: I am presently planning a Tour de France of the Musée national exhibition. Almost like a political campaign – the next presidential election in France is only 18 months away – it will tour different museums, festivals and art venues in the coming two or three years. One of the main shows, in 2017, will be at the Creux de l’enfer, an impressive art center set in a former industrial site in Thiers, followed by a participation in a retrospective on French territory photography at the BNF (Bibliothèque National de France), which has recently acquired Musée national prints. There might also be a stage of this tour on the English soil, at the Guernsey Photography Festival, and possibly in Victor Hugo’s exile house there. It seems there is a rising interest for Musée national abroad, not only in Europe, and exhibitions in Asia are also in the pipes.

© Marc Lathuillière, Somehow Anyhow: The Towers, Duraclear on mirror, 2013

I am also developing my last body of works, the ‘Dispersions’, a reflection on image and territories, including photographies mounted on mirrors as well as cultures of commensal bacteria. It is based on an essay I am presently writing, called ‘Territorism’.

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

ML: I feel the deconstruction process that has impacted photojournalism will also affect documentary photography. A lot of young artist are already playing with the limits of photography, in a multimedia way, blurring the limits with video, installation and even painting. Some approaches are highly technological: using screens or monitors, they indicate a dematerialization of the medium as a long-term tendency. Others show a come back to old printing techniques, like cyanotype or daguerreotype. I just hope this renewed interest will not give birth to a new formalism, like the one that developed in the French painting with the “Supports-Surfaces” movement in the 70’s. If photography is reaching its “Film/Surface” age, as I think it does, artist should not forget that playing with its forms is much more stimulating and involving when the subject addressed is the world outside the dark room: our complex and suffering contemporary world.

BY STEVE BISSON

© Peter Holliday from the series ‘Where the Land Rises’

Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots? And how did your research evolve with respect to those early days?

Peter Holliday (PH): Like a lot of kids I initially wanted to be an archaeologist or a historian. I grew up in a rural community close to the earthwork remains of a Roman fort built around 2000 years ago by Agricola’s army during their campaign of Scotland. A past landscape of conquest, I was intrigued about this remote outpost built on the territorial fringes of an ancient empire. I had not yet picked up a camera but what interested me were the marks this ancient culture had made on the land still clearly visible despite the passing of two millennia. In consideration of my own creative practice today, I feel my photography is inspired by the same sense of anthropological curiosity about the landscape; an investigation of nature and our place in it.

I think I was about 10 when I was given my first camera by my parents, a disposable Kodak. When I was about 15 I was given a roll of 35mm b/w film and a Minolta SLR to shoot by my father and with his help we developed it together in the kitchen.

© Peter Holliday from the series ‘Where the Land Rises’

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

PH: I studied a 4-year degree in Communication Design at art school. After the first couple of years I ended up specialising in photography under a lecturer called Andy Stark. Within the environment of art school we were continually encouraged to question the meaning and role of the photograph to help develop our themes and ideas. I certainly found that process beneficial in my own practice. Art school was also chance to see what other people were creating on a daily basis, as well as a great opportunity to use facilities that I otherwise wouldn’t have gained access to.

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

PH: I think as photography becomes increasingly digitised we’re going to see a resurgence in traditional analogue techniques where the photograph is redeemed as an object and the process is emphasised as a craft once again. Meanwhile we will continue to see artists challenge the traditional interpretation of the photograph. Take Michael Wolf for example, whose series ‘Street View’ is compiled from scenes found on Google’s Street View.

I’ve heard people say photography is in crisis, but it always has been. It is a medium that is revisionist by nature. Ever since their inception the camera and the photograph have not only been used to record the coming of modernity but have both remained powerful symbols of technological advancement. I think today’s age of the smartphone and the ‘Instagram-amatuer’ only encourages the artist to question both the role of the photographer and the definition of the photograph within a medium that is less than 200 years old, and this discussion can only be positive for this rapidly evolving art form.

© Peter Holliday from the series ‘Where the Land Rises’

Your dissertation ‘From Proletariat to Precariat: Representations of Labour in the Age of Globalisation’ explores how still photography and the moving image have been used to critically represent the condition of labour within the context of neoliberal globalisation. What are your conclusions?

By comparing the work of artists such as Sebastião Salgado, Alan Sekula, and Steve McQueen, I wanted to look at how still photography and the moving image have been used to expose conditions of labour in an era that has witnessed the significant decline of the classical Marxist conception of the proletariat and the subsequent emergence of the precariat across many post-industrial western democracies.

© Steve McQueen ‘Western Deep’ at Schaulager, Base

The images of Salgado, Sekula, and McQueen question the framework that the global forces of order use to justify their ideology of neoliberalism. But they also highlight a challenge. Marxism has been in crisis ever since its first serious political application in 1917. Here is a 19th century philosophy that promised the emancipation of the masses from the slavish labour conditions of capitalist society yet would later galvanise some of the most restrictive regimes the world has known. Meanwhile the proletariat, the class entitled with the task of abolishing capitalism, is almost non-existent in the West today.

© Sebastião Salgado, Serra Pelada, State of Pará, Brazil, 1986

Of course, any prevailing ideology that puts profit over people must be scrutinised too. We live in a post-Marxist age, as illustrated by Alan Sekula whose work ‘Fish Story’ reveals the ‘invisible’ maritime economy as a metaphor for the condition of the precariat and contemporary labour under neoliberalism. However, Salgado’s ‘Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age’ and McQueen’s short film ‘Western Deep’ remind us of the alienating drudgery of labour under globalisation and the continuing existence of the proletariat within many developing economies.

© Alan Sekula

If we are to address the problems evidenced by these artists, we must find a new politics based on socialist ideas that is able to transcend the bureaucratic orthodoxies of its Marxist predecessor. Within many western democracies, I believe there is a growing consensus towards this type of progressive change.

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

PH: Much of my current research explores the austere coastal and mountainous landscapes of ‘the North’ and of the people who endure such environments. I’m drawn to the history of northwest Europe and the polar regions, and by the mythologies inspired by these remote topographies for centuries.

I want to highlight the human relationship with the landscapes that mankind finds itself in. My aim in my work is to reflect on themes of time, memory, and home within the context of the cultural, historical, political, and emotional significance of the topographies that underpin humanity’s existence. I want to reveal nature as something material that exists in relation to human subjectivity, expressing landscape as both an entity influenced by human action as well as something that was always-already there, characterised by ongoing objective forces that do not cease to exist beyond human consciousness.

© Peter Holliday from the series ‘Where the Land Rises’

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

PH: I enjoy the process of negative film. I’ve so far worked mostly with medium format. There’s definitely a lot more consideration involved with film and I think that’s really important especially when it comes to approaching landscape.

Tell us about your project 'Where the Land Rises’.

PH: ‘Where the Land Rises’ is a series documenting the people and landscape of Heimaey, the largest island of the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago in southern Iceland. The project is a retrospective on the eruption of Eldfell which began on 23rd January 1973 and lasted until June of the same year. The event led to the immediate evacuation of the island, destroying many homes and violently altering the geography of Heimaey. As the lava flow moved towards the harbour threatening to destroy the island’s economic lifeline, interventions were made to divert the drifting lava, and a dam of solidified basalt was successfully created by spraying the flow with billions of litres of seawater. The harbour had been saved but the island’s landscape had been changed forever.

© Peter Holliday from the series ‘Where the Land Rises’

Within the temporal scale of our existence, significant geological change often happens too slowly for humans to experience. Although commonplace in Iceland, volcanic eruptions are unique and notable events. After my initial investigations of the eruption of Eldfell, I thought about how it must feel to witness the geography of your homeland change so dramatically within several months and what this sudden trauma to the symbolic order of existence reveals about humanity’s relationship with the landscapes we dwell in. Now 42 years on, my project aims to not only reflect on what was lost during the eruption but also to document what has been regained since by the island’s inhabitants.

© Peter Holliday from the series ‘Where the Land Rises’

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

PH: There are a few. I recently watched Andrey Zvyagintsev’s latest film ‘Leviathan’ (2014), a tragic drama about government corruption that explores mankind’s ties to the land against the desolate backdrop of a Russian coastal town on the northern extremes of civilisation. That film certainly resonated with me a lot; I feel like I’m aiming to express similar sentiments about landscape in my own work. The cinematography by Mikhail Krichman is stunning too.

My favourite photographers are those that focus on the human-landscape relationship such as Bryan Schutmaat, Sébastien Tixier, Dana Lixenberg, Nadav Kander, Danila Tkachenko, and Edward Burtynsky. I also enjoy the films of Werner Herzog, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Terrence Malick.

Three books of photography that you recommend?

PH: My favourite photobook has to be ‘American Prospects’ by Joel Sternfeld. I also really admire ‘The Place of No Roads’ by Ville Lenkerri, and ‘The Last Days of Shishmaref’ by Dana Lixenberg.

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

PH: I recently saw Joakim Eskildsen’s exhibition A world I can believe in at the National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen, Denmark. The show was an extensive retrospective of Eskildsen’s work presented in a positively unconventional way - instead of being framed, much of the work was mounted or pinned to the wall. Also on display were the artist’s contact sheets, several book dummies, and multiple sketchbooks, allowing the viewer to engage in Eskilden’s process as a photographer.

© Peter Holliday from the series ‘Where the Land Rises’

Tell us more about projects that you are working on now and plans for the future?

PH: I’m currently preparing to show some images from my project ‘Where the Land Rises’ at an upcoming solo exhibition at the Reykjavík Museum of Photography that opens in early December and runs until late January 2016. With regard to my future practise I aim to continue exploring landscapes of the North and I’m keen to develop a project about the Shetland Isles. I’ve always been fascinated by Scandinavia and northwest Europe and I’d like to understand more about how my home country of Scotland fits into this broad region both culturally and historically at a time when questions of Scottish identity are continually being asked.

© Peter Holliday from the series ‘Where the Land Rises’

You have recently joined the Urbanautica team to help us deepen the UK photo scene? What are your impressions? Any British photographer that you are particularly fond of?

PH: There are countless talented photographers within the UK scene and I’m looking forward to discovering more of them as a contributor to Urbanautica. I really admire the work of Jon Tonks’ and his series Empire which documents the few remaining British Overseas Territories around the world today. I also recommend the work of my friend, Alan Knox, and his project ‘Universal Sympathy’ which is a fascinating series of photograms made using his grandfather’s ashes exploring the cosmic connection between life and death.

BY DIETER DEBRUYNE

© Boris Eldagsen, #98, ‘The Poems’

Tell us about your approach to photography. How would you describe your personal research in general?

Boris Eldagsen (BE): In my work I’m interested in transforming what is in front of my lens, trying to show the unconscious reality beyond time and space

I have given myself the task of creating a timeless image that has an impact on an emotional as well as an unconscious level, something which cannot be translated into words. So I ask myself the question if it’s possible for me to show an internal psychological structure by using the material that’s in front of my camera.

To achieve this I hijack what others refer to as ‘reality’. Technically speaking half of my images are considered street photography, but it’s not about showing what was happening at that particular time and place. If I can make all of this disappear to create a timeless image or psychological archetype I have achieved my goal.

© Boris Eldagsen, #102, ‘The Poems’

© Boris Eldagsen, #95, ‘The Poems’

This method enables me to work wherever I am without the need of a studio or specific location. I only need the night time, my camera and my laptop, and sometimes an adventurous volunteer model.

How did your research evolve in time? Starting from your first shots to you work now?

BE: Over the past 20 years I’ve tried out all possible ways of working, starting conceptually or just intuitively working from my gut. I started working very intuitively when I was 18 years old and now I’m back where I started, with the difference of possessing a deep and wide knowledge of what I do. It’s as if my conscious and unconsciousness are dancing together.

Tell us about your latest project ‘how to disappear completely | THE POEMS’

BE: With ‘THE POEMS’, I want to create images that have an impact on an emotional and unconscious level that cannot be translated into words. I call my images POEMS to show that they aren’t stories but a creative use of the medium of photography that requires you to engage in the conversation with your own feelings and memories. A poem uses words in creative ways to evoke feelings and memories and it’s much more open than a story, you need to interpret it with your heart, mind and soul.

‘THE POEMS’ is a meta-series that currently contains over 100 images all of which can be combined in endless possible ways, in accordance with the subject of an exhibition. My site-specific installations feature photographs in 5 different sizes on large-scale wallpapers. The images are clustered and hung together like groups of connected emotions and memories. The variations in size force the viewer to shift his perception, from being a giant looking at a tiny picture to being a midget walking through an enormous wallpaper.

Boris Eldagsen, Galerie, Voies Off, Arles, France, 2014

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

BE: A lot of contemporary photography tends to stick to the surface or run around a documentary/rational concept. But if you are not able to see what’s inside, just stop photographing the world outside. I want to feel the emotions, the guts, the artist’s own demons. If a piece of work is too rational I can appreciate the concept but I remain untouched, it still bores me to see typological work by followers of followers of the Becher School for instance.
That said, I also feel that times are changing. Over the past three years I have visited many photography festivals and there is a fine group of photo artists between 27-40 years old, producing amazing work. I can definitely see some trends: a return to black and white, symbolic work, journeys inside, new mixes of abstract and figurative and so on.

I do not care that much about photography, to me photography is just a medium that can be used for any purpose. If photography festivals would be festivals of words or poetry, we would see advertisements, newspapers, lyrics, trashy magazines and world class literature, how-to-manuals and cooking recipes. But because language is the oldest medium of humans, we do not have events like these, they are all split up in their various sub-forms.
With photography it is still a mixed bag, this is why it’s necessary to be conscious about your own reasons and purpose to use photography, it is only then when people using photography are truly able to communicate. Such is the case with social media. You need to know how and where to communicate your ideas, who you want to talk to and what you would like to get out of it.

© Boris Eldagsen, #21, ‘The Poems’

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

BE: I’m mostly influenced by historic painters (the likes of Hieronymus Bosch, Rembrandt van Rijn, William Blake, C.D.Friedrich, Arnold Böcklin, Max Ernst) and film (Peter Greenaway), not so much by photographers to be honest. There really is no existing influence from the world of photography but a feeling of relatedness to some aspects in the work of Lieko Shiega, Roger Ballen, Sarker Protick, Nadja Bournonville, Alexander Gehring, Katrin Koenning, Alis Resnik, Magdalena Wywrot, Marlous van der Sloot and a young Bangladeshi photographer named Shadman Shahid.

Three books of photography that you recommend?

BE: - ‘Rasen Kaigan’, 2013, by Lieko Shiega
- ‘Grand Circle Diego’, 2014, by Cyril Costilhes
- ‘Shadow Chamber’, 2006, by Roger Ballen

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

BE: At this year’s Noorderlicht festival, the curators Wim Melis and Hester Keijser built two opposing shows: one with a rational conceptual approach named ‘Data Rush’ and its counterpart ‘Pulse’, representing the intuitive, dark and emotional side. Being one of the 15 ‘Pulse’ artists it felt like this was the beginning of something new, a symbol of some kind. This is what the curators said: «What we encounter in the work is someone looking back at us, with the kind of gaze that meets you in the mirror, and you’re not quite sure if you are looking at yourself or a stranger…the feeling of throwing yourself into the pool, of sudden cold rushing past your skin, the water entering your mouth, ears, nose, your senses.» It’s also worth checking out the whole list of artists here.

© Boris Eldagsen, #91, ‘The Poems’

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

BE: Carine Dolek (from Circulations Festival and Le Petit Espace, Paris) won the Young Curator’s Award, curating my work at this year’s PhotoLux Festival in Lucca, Italy. As the festival’s theme is “Sacred & Profane”, we are currently preparing a big solo exhibition mixing photography, wallpapers, video and objects. The opening is scheduled for November 21st.

Besides the fact that ‘THE POEMS’ is constantly evolving (I have been working on this for 6 years and since I became more focussed on installation the work takes off), I feel like I have freshly fallen in love, there is so much more to explore and expand towards the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk. I can’t imagine quitting this work and starting something new just yet.

© Boris Eldagsen, #55, ‘The Poems’

How do you see the future of photography in general evolve? And where do you place yourself in this future?

BE: The technology of cameras is constantly evolving and like always there are artists working on this matter, making this technical development their subject.
I belong to the group of artists that can work with any type of technology, we look onwards and we are interested in timeless questions and archetypes. Technology just helps us to create our images and I predict that this small group of artists will grow. The last Noorderlicht festival based its whole festival on this distinction. On one side ‘Data Rush’, the conceptual ‘Tech-Geeks’ and on the other side ‘Pulse’, powered by desire, emotions and the quest for the unconscious.

Boris Eldagsen | urbanautica Germany

SHEUNG YIU

The Untimely Apparatus, 2015 © Lam Pok Yin Jeff and Chong Ng

Contemplating on the rapid transition of photography in the last two decades, a surge of young contemporary photographers have been creating work centered around analogue photographic process and alternative photography. Jeff Lam is one of them and he can tell you why this wave of retrospection is not just some nostalgia-driven obsession.
The Hong Kong photographer originally trained in architecture challenges mainstream norms and provoke viewers to investigate the relationship between photographic process and images. In his series, ‘The Untimely Apparatus of Two Amateur Photographers’, he and his classmates, Chong Ng, turned seemingly unrelated objects into cameras, creating images that cannot be otherwise produced by your everyday click-and-shoot camera. In this way, Jeff and Chong wanted to subvert the popular assumption that camera is a delicate and expensive equipment. The project also reveals that the conventional equipment that we have grown so familiar with image making, a tool, according to Lam, can put up an illusion of free photographic choice and limit the possibility of “what light can create when it hits a photosensitive surface”. The series won the Portfolio prize of GuatePhoto 2015 Open Call from over 1,700 entries. So when the now Shanghai-based photographer came back to Hong Kong in late October, I caught him for an interview. (The conversation is edited for clarity)

What is your history with photography? What is your first camera? How did you become a photographer?

JEFF LAM (JL): When I was around eight, I found a pentax camera with a zoom lens. I liked to use it as a telescope to look around. Eventually, I developed an interest in photographic equipments. Then at around a similar time, my family got a Kodak instamatic camera for buying electrical appliances. It was one with no manual control, no flash, just a press-and-shoot camera. I played with it a lot. One time I thought of adding a camera flash to it, so I just tied a flashlight on the camera. That is my first experience modifying a camera.

After graduating from The University of Hong Kong with an architecture degree, I worked in an architectural firm for an year but I felt that what I did was not improving our living environment. I worked on some project in China, spending countless night hours working on a colossal architecture in the middle of nowhere, obviously built to boost up the city’s GDP. More often, architecture has nothing to do with design but politics. I was dissatisfied with what I was doing, so I decided to take three years off to pursue another career, working as a freelance photographer and designer. That year, I applied to a photography school.

Adaptation of a Slide Projector into a Camera, 2015 © Lam Pok Yin Jeff and Chong Ng

Tele-Pinhole Camera, 2015 © Lam Pok Yin Jeff and Chong Ng

Adaptation of a Time Measuring Device into a Photographic Apparatus, 2015 © Lam Pok Yin Jeff and Chong Ng

How is your research process for your award winning project at the Guate Photo Open Call - The Untimely Apparatus Of Two Amateur Photographers?

JL: One day, My partner Ng received his work from his printer in a 1.5-metre giant mailing tube. We got this random idea of making a pinhole camera out of it, the biggest telephoto pinhole camera ever. We were curious about the photograph this ultra-tele pinhole camera would produce. We put a photo paper at one end, did some basic light proofing and took it to the backyard to try it out. We kept refining the apparatus and experimenting with different pinhole sizes.

At the time, bird watching was pretty popular among hipsters in the UK, so we had this idea of going bird watching with this camera as an satirical and playful comment on the new trend of equipment fetish. We found out the the exposure time was too long for photo paper so we switched it to negative and built a 4 by 5 film chamber. We bought a hunting rifle scope as a viewfinder - a suggestion from Ng who had been in military service. The finished product was a ridiculously mammoth camera. It became the first piece of our project.

We brought it with us to a wetland park in suburban London, as well as two binoculars. We set up everything, posed and took self portraits of ourselves using the self-made camera. It attracted much attention from visitors.
The initial idea is to make a camera out of objects that somehow related to its function. After the telescope, we have brainstormed a list of cameras we wanted to construct and worked on some feasible ones. The entire project is about camera itself, its structure and properties.

Bird Hunting with Tele-Pinhole Camera, Excursion #5, 2015 © Lam Pok Yin Jeff and Chong Ng

We started working on our second camera, using revolving projector, after seeing one in Saatchi gallery. Being machine maniacs, we thought of inverting its mechanism and revert the light path so that the machine absorbs light into its body instead of projecting light. The second camera is about how photographic technology compresses 3-dimensional reality into 2D imageries. Inspired by the circular slide holders, we created a light sensitive sculpture, exposed with a camera with multiple lenses to make a 3D negative. The sculpture is then photographed again with the projector-camera 360 degree and convert the 3D negative into many comprehensible 2D positive slides.
For the third camera, we wanted to work with a bigger and more abstract concept. We worked with pinpoint of a reality for the tele-pinhole camera, three-dimensionality for the projector, for the third one, we decided to experiment with time. Originally, we thought of placing photo paper on a analog clock to do a long-exposure light painting of some sort, but we later had an idea of using a flip clock. It makes much more sense. Each flip could be a new exposure and each flat plastic indicates the exposure time. The flip clock we used, as we found out later on, was produced by Copal, a Japanese large format lens manufacturer and has been making flip clock for decades. For mechanical nerds like us, the discovery further supported the idea that time and photography have an intricate and subtle relationship.

The execution was exceptionally technical. Some clock has 1 flat plastic for each minute (00 - 59) while some have one for digit in one and in ten respectively. We used the later one with fewer flat plastics as we need more space in the back of the clock to expose photo paper. We expose the paper for 9 hours. The result is a photograph with four different exposures of the same scene. The exposure time of each part is the same, yet depending on lighting environment, the resulting image is different. There have been many trails and errors.

Details of prints from Kawara’s Clock, 2015 © Lam Pok Yin Jeff and Chong Ng

In your statement statement you said that new photographic technologies while democratising the art of photography, can also be a restriction to new narratives. What do you mean by that?

JL: No doubt, this project is a critical approach to contemporary photography. The digitalisation makes photography truly democratic. Everyone have a camera in their pockets these days. Anyone can afford what used to be an aristocratic luxury in the past. Photography is much less expensive yet this also means we have fewer possibilities when it comes to taking a picture. If we understand photography as simply “traces of light on a light-sensitive medium”, then making an image by clicking a shutter would be abandoning many other alternative techniques such as len-less photography and photogram.

Media scholar Vilem Flusser inspired this project. A camera is just a black box. He said If we stop questioning the development of this image-producing black box, soon photography and camera mechanisms would be predominantly controlled by marketing decisions. The image you get will be limited to what these cameras can produce.

And that has an broad effect to not just photographers but the society as a whole. We understand the world through images. If the cameras on the market all tend to create for example, close-up photos, we may slowly develop preference towards a certain kind of familiar images. People may think they are shooting freely and making conscious choices, but the moment you pick up a mainstream camera on the market, the choices you can make is already limited by the machine.

Chinese and Japanese traditionally spend a lot of time talking about composition. There are countless discussions on the photographic image, focusing on literally the surface of the photograph, the visual elements, the thing you see. Photographers spend a lot of effort recreating a certain visual style and relatively little on the photographic process and its significance. Thus, this project is an antithesis of the indifference to the relationship between imagery and photographic process.

Results from Bird Hunting Excursion #2, 2015 © Lam Pok Yin Jeff and Chong Ng

Glass Sphere Coated with Liquid Emulsion, Attempt #18, 2015 © Lam Pok Yin Jeff and Chong Ng

I am curious about the title of the project? Why do you emphasise on ‘two amateur photographers’? Is it a conscious choice to separate yourself from the mainstream professional photography in order to establish an outsider critical perspective?

JL: Yes. I instinctively wanted to challenge the prevailing notion that professionalism means the creation of smooth and glamorous images. I think commercial image is too perfect and too easy to digest. You can say I put the word ‘amateur’ in the title as my stubborn refusal to that ideal.

The way we produce this project is also very amateurish. It all started from playing with a mailing tube. We finished much of our experiments at home. We did not have a professional darkroom, but a laundry room where we developed photos, built our camera and conducted every testing in. We learnt everything from scratch. We went on Youtube for tutorials if we got stuck. We asked around for answers. The things that we had been doing fits into the idea of amateur.

We did all that out of curiosity. The project is a prove that one need not to be a “professional”. Yes, you need to understand the basic mechanism of a camera and how it contributes to the construction of images, but photography does not have to be high-tech. Camera is not a refined nor delicate equipment as marketers wanted us to believe. It is something that anyone could temper, build and modify.

How does your education in architecture affect your approach to photography?

My training emphasises on a critical thinking process. Every design element has to be supported and justified. Every step of the research process has to be interlinked. and thus coherently bringing out your ideas. No decision is arbitrary. We don’t do things just because we like it a certain way. At the time, I really hated the methodology, but it turns out to be very useful to think about photography.

Video still of the operation, 2015 © Lam Pok Yin Jeff and Chong Ng

What is your working relationship with Chong Ng? Why do you choose to work as a duo? How does it all happen?

JL: We are classmates. We became friends in the first year of school and then moved on to live together with other photography students in the next year. We have always shared many common interests, especially in machinery. We would share links about things like installations and machines that smoke cigarettes. We had similar vision aesthetically. In the third year, I decided to team up with him for the school’s group projects.

The collaboration was really smooth. Because we have similar expectations for the outcome, so we save a lot of time arguing or communicating despite that we have different approaches. When we brainstorm, we did research online together. We conceived some possible experimental cameras. We shared our sketches. We will then keep some of these rough ideas our head, waiting for it to evolve and mature.

I cannot finish this project by myself. There are too many technical matters to deal with on the operational side of the project. Countless trails and errors. For instance, to take a photos with the flip clock, we have to disassemble the clock, make sure the flat plastics are in the correct sequence, cut and paste the photo paper to the exact size and reassemble it again. All these done in our makeshift darkroom for 3-4 hours in pitch black. There were too much frustration for one to bear. Each of us is responsible for a particular role, He spent more time with execution while I am responsible for presenting and articulating our concepts.

Who inspires your photography?

JL: Steven Pippin comes to my mind. He is a prolific artist in the 80s who works mainly on performance-based art related to photography. He once turned a photo booth into a giant pinhole camera and posed for his self portrait outside of it. For ‘Homage to Muybridge’, he made photos using a row of washing machines by simply putting a photo paper in the right moment and pouring developer inside. The resulting image is a series of consecutive photographs of him walking overlapped with dark blobs and scratches caused by the movement of the machines. He is someone I truly respect and has huge influence in my work.

Other contemporary photographers that inspire my work are duos like Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin and Tay Onorato & Nico Krebs.

BY LAURA LEE BRAL

Born in 1968, Antwerp-based photographer Jan Kempenaers is best known for producing photographic series which focus on urban and natural landscapes. His Spomenik (2006 - 2009) series — images of deserted war monuments that dotter across the landscape of former Yugoslavia — inspired a PhD in the visual arts that Kempenaers completed in 2012. He is currently working on a new project centered abstract photography.

Tell us about your approach to photography. How it all started?

Jan Kempenaers (JK): After I completed secondary education, I chose to study film and photography at The Royal Academy in Ghent. In those days (mid-eighties), film and photography were together one department but film courses didn’t start until the third year. That’s why I never really explored film; instead I wanted to further deepen my knowledge of photography. At the time there was a special interest in decisive moment photography, as pioneered by Henri Cartier-Bresson. I found this to be very frustrating because I always felt I missed that moment. My search for a different kind of photography resulted in capturing landscapes.

Your work often depicts hybrid landscapes, exploring the intersection between nature and city. Where does this fascination come from?

JK: I always tried to photograph the scenery from high vantage points, wherein the different elements and functions within the landscape become intertwined. I developed an interest in the manner in which to approach this intersection and began to take pictures of landscapes, mainly in Wallonia and harbor areas because there you can easily see how the industrial merges with agriculture and people living in their homes. In my later work, I tried to further explore those functions.

In what way did your research on the picturesque contribute to your work as an artist and how did your work evolve over time?

JK: This was one of the questions I answered during my doctoral defense. I completed the theoretical part of my PhD in the final year and I worked on it for the entire year. Hence, I don’t believe there was much influence, apart maybe from things I’d already read before. While I did discover some formal aspects of the picturesque in my own photos, I never explicitly started a project with criteria of the picturesque in mind. It was more the other way around.

I used to seize panoramic landscapes from high viewpoints though I’m not interested in this anymore. In recent years, I’ve been focusing on freestanding elements that are not attached to landscapes, such as monuments or architectural buildings. While capturing broad panoramic views, I became aware of a double viewing distance. On the one hand, the distance creates a sense of overall composition wherein details merely function to balance the scenery. Yet, at the same time, those details appear closer in the pictures than in reality because everything in it is magnified. I thought those magnified details were quite interesting and I began to photograph them as separate elements. Furthermore, through the context of my research for my PhD, I was stimulated to take pictures of modern ruins and approach them as a subject an sich, as a sort of sculpture, a literal sculpture in the case of monuments. Here I didn’t search for higher positions anymore, but instead decided on an eye level viewpoint. Thus the idea partly emerged from looking at my own work but it also connected to my research on the picturesque because ruins are important within the picturesque tradition.

When you start a project, do you already have an idea of where you’re going, or do you let yourself be guided by experimentation, by the process itself?

JK: In the past, when I still photographed landscapes, I liked to travel and look around a lot. Taking in what comes your way. Then I thought about why it would be interesting to get an overview of the landscape. With a project like Spomenik (2006 - 2009) it is of course different because I had to determine in advance where the monuments were located and gather information about the monuments before I photographed them. So in that way I knew precisely where I was going.

Dirk De Meyer described your work as « exploration of the continuing relevance of the picturesque in the contemporary visualization of our environment» are your thoughts on photography in the era of digital and social networking?

JK: My PhD in the arts was about linking other works to certain criteria of the picturesque. First I selected a number of crucial photographers throughout history who were concerned with nature and landscape. On the basis of books by pioneer William Gilpin, I then tried to determine which of those criteria were typically conveyed in images like paintings. Afterwards I applied this approach to my own work and further described it.

In my personal opinion, photography is an autonomous practice. Nowadays a lot of photos are taken and spread through the internet but that is not what I want to do. I always try to limit the amount of photographs because I rather capture a few iconic images than just making lots of photos. To me this notion is important.

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

JK: That’s a very technical question. Actually, I use all kind of equipment, including 4 x 5 inch and digital cameras. I don’t think it’s important to be technical proficient. It depends on the image you make with it. Which type of camera doesn’t really matter.

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

JK: No, I can’t think of any contemporary photographer but the New Topographics were initially important, mainly during the start of my studies.

What are the projects that you are working on now and do you have any plans for the future?

JK: At this moment I’m working on abstract photography that is embedded in an entire research project. I am still exploring different paths to come to an abstraction of a photograph. Originally, I examined screen prints and there were a few art integration projects wherein the abstraction of an image reoccurs via frames. Now I’m occupied with combinations of images, also resulting in an abstraction of it. Additionally, a new book with Roma Publications has been planned.

Can you name three books of photography that you would recommend?

JK: 1) The new edition of ‘New Topographics’ (2010) published by Steidl
2) ‘Concorde’ (2008) by Wolfgang Tillmans,
3) ‘Roads’ (2001) by Werner Mantz, published by Stichting Werner Mantz

BY STEVE BISSON

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

Petros Koublis (PK): Everything started from a coincidence. It’s 15 years now since photography found its way into my life but today it feels like it was with me the whole time. I always had a tender relationship with painting and as I was growing up I used to imagine that this was going to be the path I would eventually follow. I could feel inside me the impulse of a sensitivity that permitted frail aspects and discreet sides of the world around me to become visible. Throughout my childhood I was constantly feeling that I had to protect this sensitivity, to refine and keep it safe and alive inside me, no matter how hard it could be at times. This became the medium through which I was addressing the world and it became the language that was giving shape to my thoughts. With photography I found a more direct and intimate way to approach a world that was generating all these emotions inside me. When I found myself with a camera in my hands it felt natural and familiar. Looking back at that period I think it was photography that found me and not the other way around.

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

PK: My research is mostly an organic process, it’s something intuitive. In order to put together a body of work I have to embrace it with an honest and sincere heart. Some patterns remained constant and in many ways I do practice photography the same way I was doing it when I first started. My images are the result of long, extensive walks and this is the way I still prefer to make images. In that sense I could probably say that my research is mostly the outcome of a peripatetic process. I let ideas flow freely inside me as I experience the world around me. Then I attempt to put them in order, but not before I have fist exposed them long enough to my feelings. Further research could gratefully offer a foundation for my thoughts, it can enrich my project with more aspects and facilitate a conversation between my work and the ones of those before me. But in the end everything is coming down to the heart. I could never find the passion or the precious devotion to follow something that was conceived in my mind and not inside my heart.

Few months ago you told me you were working on a new body of work that focuses on the way we perceive this world through our senses. You mentioned the importance of books and ideas written by ancient Greek philosophers. What did you learn?

PK: Reason and logic unfolded gradually through the centuries. Going through the philosophical schools of the late Hellenistic and early Roman period, is something really exciting. Logic first tried to methodically express everything through unified theories that were including rational conclusions about the physical world and philosophical assumptions about the intelligible one as well. These unified theories were attempting an ambitious balance between a mere scientific way of thinking and the metaphysical ideas that dominated the world during the ancient times, resulting both in what became the foundation of modern science but also in a complicated corpus of mystical allegories and obscured interpretations over the human experience. We can still hear the echo of this transitional period. Psychology, for instance, could offer a wonderful example. It is the only science that within its very title contains a metaphysical conception that can’t be scientifically proven: the existence of the soul that is. Psyche is the Greek word for the soul, equivalent of the Latin word Anima. Psychology actually means the study of the Soul and, regardless of how rationalists could justify the context of that meaning, I still find this to be impressive, especially because of the deterministic prevalence that rules sciences today. It does make sense, I guess, that some of the greatest contributors to the study of myths were psychologists, like Freud or Jung. Freud in fact described myths as the distorted vestiges of the wish-fantasies of whole nations, the age-long dreams of young humanity. This is a dimension of the human spirit that my soul can easily relate with.

Let’s talk about ‘In Dreams’. What I see in this work, as in other previous works you did, is a mythological perspective leading to a primordial narratives. How do you developed this series? How did you construct the narrative?

PK: The project started coming together quite naturally, almost intuitively, as a response to the recurring tragedies of our days, the continuous drama that so many people are suffering, here in Greece and all over the world. Although I feel this work to be a reaction to the pains of humanity, nothing in this project refers to the narrative of violence and desperation. I have chosen to go the opposite direction, not to cause a reaction against the stories we see on the daily news reports, but to discreetly address with a whisper our childhood innocence, when our dreams were giving shape to this world, when our mind was prone to tender imagination rather than strict logic. With ‘In Dreams’ I tried to put together, image by image, an alternate world, one that our mind would find to be strange, distant, unfamiliar, like a sequence of fragments delivering from a forgotten myth. Plato was claiming that myths can convey meanings that are hidden from our mind and can only be reached through our intuition. When we put our mind in doubt then other senses become more alert, revealing concepts that are free of words and definitions. This is, I want to believe, the heart of this series.

There are limits to our perception, therefore we are not able to fully perceive what is essentially mind-independent, free of form, shape and definition. We are bound to keep addressing a mental version of reality, limited within the confines of our understanding. Through Mythology the human spirit could philosophically approach those remote areas of a system much bigger than what we are able to perceive. As if through Myths, our spirit is able to overcome the boundaries of the mind and expose our intuition to a much greater reality. In this context, I regard ‘In Dreams’ to be a confident act of Romanticism, a hope that maybe the dreams we had as children can question the reality we live as adults and they can open a passage towards a better future.

The landscape. Tell us about your relationship with nature and the places that photographers.

PK: My work focuses on nature because I prefer to be there, I find that urban areas lack the harmony my soul can relate with. I feel a warm calmness inside me when I revisit places I had already seen before, so all of these years I kept coming back to certain areas. The familiarity I was developing with these places helped me search deeper, be more abstract, overcome the first impression they impose and explore more my own deepest emotional reaction to them. Through the years I put together my own geography of feelings, composed by the places I was visiting in search of some emotional state. The mountains, the sea, the forests, the marshlands, they all wake certain feelings inside me. I kept going there exploring more of their emotional influence on my soul. Everything left a mark inside me. My instinct constantly drives me towards the ideas of pantheism so I approach everything as a fragment of a unity that contains as all. Then Nature becomes a form of philosophy on its own, both a cosmological and a teleological one.

The sea. The cliffs are a recurring subject. They work slowly on our perception. And then it becomes possible to grasp a metamorphosis. The rocks become something else…

PK: I have been always finding the human experience to be a captivating story, thrilling and enchanting in a touching and profound way. A long journey through the centuries and the millennia, addressing a universe that gets to be interpreted and experienced in a whole new way every time we manage to push the boundaries of our understanding a bit further. The metamorphosis of the world is a recurring phenomenon, as both the concept of things and the context of their universal structure is constantly changing in our eyes. We will never be able to look at the sky the same way our ancestors did, for neither the sun nor the stars have the same meaning to us as they did to them. These are the foregone realities of our spirit, lost in a distant past, beyond any knowledge that we could ever hope to regain.

There are some reappearing subjects in my work, like the cliffs or the rocks, but they’re more like the leitmotif of my soul’s narrative, things I identify myself easily with, regardless of my ability to explain it. On the other hand, the occurring metamorphosis constitutes the emotional narrative I wish to unfold. It’s not about the transformation of the subject matter into something else, but the transformation of our own approach towards it. The metamorphosis occurs only in our perception. I’m not after any optical illusions, the transformation I am looking for occurs gradually, discreetly, slowly, it reveals itself the second time we look, not the first one. This is why, I believe, I always return to Mythology to satisfy the thirst of my soul. Myths continue to echo a signal sent from the very first pulse of humanity, like a dream hanging between the oblivion of a distant past and the revelation of a secret future, in a world that breathes life into a new reality every time we look at it.

What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking? Mostly a technological era still as you said «A world without observers is a world without definitions»…

PK: A world without observers is a world without definitions and therefore things are defined not by the way they appear but by the way they are. Infinite and incomprehensible to our senses. We have been always defining things based on their appearance, the way we could perceive them through our senses. For Aristotle, for example, the earth was standing still in the middle of the cosmos, with the sun and the rest of the planets turning around it. It does appear to our senses to be like that indeed but now we know it just isn’t. Yet, even though our mind has surpassed our senses and today we are able to handle concepts that are fundamentally unreachable by them, like infinity, relativity, or the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, we still define things based on the coherent appearance of an appropriate mathematical model. Appearance is not a property of the subject matter, but a property applied to it by its observer. The world, the way we know it, exists only in our own mind.

If we approach this suggestion from a different angle, we could claim that since the ones who observe are the ones who define things, an increase in the number of observers would also increase the number of the possible alternate appearances that some subject could have, at least until they all settle for a while in a dominant definition and a single appearance.

Photography never had so much attention paid to it till this day either. Among all arts, photography has to be the one that aligned itself the most with our digital era. From an activity of devoted artists, serious amateurs and benevolent memory worshippers, making photographs became one of the most common activities in the western world and sharing these images with the global community became the most natural thing we could do with them. There are many approaches to this phenomenon, and I have frequently heard photographers, scholars and academics expressing different opinions about the meaning and the importance it has. I have also witnessed them changing their mind about it, subscribing themselves to a different approach every now and then. In the same time, I have the feeling that many of the classic books on photography’s aesthetics and semiotics have became somehow obsolete, fragments of a near past. That thing alone convinces me that photography has certainly entered a redefinition period, which started with digital imaging and continued with the effects of social networking. The actual nature of Photography right now is only an hypothesis.

I have often argued and wrote these years that photography is a philosophical exercise. In this sense, it serves more to those who do it rather than to those who view it. So I fully agree with what you wrote your work: «a little effort to challenge the authority of the mind. […] Not a passive denial of reason but a conscious rejection.». Can you comment on this statement…

PK: Every art addresses the whole of our senses. A melody can be as soft as a caress, or an image as hard as a rock. All arts somehow coexist in one another, since they all deliver from the vast space of our senses rather than the narrow path of our instincts. An image, however, can provide us with a more accurate description of how a moment feels like. Not the moment that takes place within a specific space and time, but the one that lies inside us in the most personal dimension there is. In every culture and language around the world, when we express the deepest of our needs or desires, we always place that wish within a single moment. When we’re sad we ask for a moment of joy, when we’re tired we wish for a moment of rest, in our pain we beg for a moment of relief. We never ask for a specific amount of time, only for that single moment. In other words, we always crave to release ourselves from the confines of time and space. It can only happen within the time period of a moment, for this is where lies the deepest expression of our existence. And if our mind is bound to time, our soul remains always free, within the intuitive eternity of this very moment.
I’m interested in the way we perceive this world through our intuition, when we find the courage to challenge the authority of the mind over our reality. It is because a sincere evaluation of our reality inevitably reveals the inequalities of our world and the imperfections our society. Logic and reason are not sufficient enough on their own to reveal the most tender and unique aspects of the human experience, the ones that gave shape to some of the most precious achievements of our spirit, like love, solidarity, compassion and equality. Logic can easily explain why Sophocles’ play Antigone is a masterpiece, but in order to understand, feel and identify ourselves with the heroine’s acts, one has to abandon the mind and rely on intuition, to go as far as to defy reason in favor of a sincere and profound humanism. This isn’t a passive denial but a conscious rejection or reason.

What are your planning to do with this project and with the next future?

PK: I keep my heart free to dream and open to receive and I let things come their own way towards me. I think it’s more honest and simple like that. Future exists only as a possibility. All of our existence hides itself inside a single moment.

BY PETER HOLLIDAY

Now 75 years after the first German ordnance fell on London, the first photobook from London-based photographers Thom and Beth Atkinson, ‘Missing Buildings’, documents the silent spaces left behind by the indiscriminate violence of the Blitz during the Second World War. Taken amongst the heart of the British capital over a period of 6 years, their photographs are reminiscent of scenes of an abandoned war-torn city, devoid of its human populace. Where buildings once stood between the architecture of the old and new, a violent past remains obscured. But the project is also a testament to the regeneration and urban redevelopment that would follow in the post-war years. These empty mythological sites lend themselves to our imagination and remind us that perhaps the legacy of war and its aftermath are more profound than the event itself.

‘Missing Buildings’ explores the physical legacy of the London Blitz during the Second World War. What were your initial inspirations for this series? What did you discover?

Thom Atkinson (TA): The starting point for ‘Missing Buildings’ was really just an instinctive feeling. We’d both been living in London for a while and, in different ways, we both felt very aware of this particular history of the Blitz. Perhaps our motivation was to try to understand the feeling we had about London and the connection we felt to what had happened there. I think this is just the result of being British and being the generation that we are - the Blitz is a kind of mythology to us and we felt drawn to it. Like a lot of people, our grandparents
were involved in, and affected by the bombing of London. To some extent, it’s an event which has formed us and our perception of who we are.

‘Missing Buildings’ was photographed over 6 years as a collaboration between you and your sister, Beth Atkinson. Tell us about this process. How did your approach towards this series change within this time?

TA: The project was made by walking. We’d walk through London every Sunday, talking and looking. That process of walking and thinking things through together over such a long time was what made the project. I think we gave it enough time and effort to evolve by itself. It gave us a chance to develop an genuine instinct for finding and photographing the sites, and it allowed us to think about it slowly and come to an understanding about what we were doing. It got deeper and more elusive as we went on, which, for me, means that a
piece of work is going in the right direction.

From the Georgian terraces to the Brutalist housing blocks your project documents both the pre-war and post-war architectural landscape of the British capital. What is it about London’s buildings and urban planning that interests you?

TA: When you scratch the surface, the landscape of a city reveals so much. Within the particular slice of history we were looking at, we found loss and disaster, but also endurance and recovery. The architecture and planning of London betrays the human dreams, ideals and disasters which created it.

The juxtaposition between contrasting architecture is an important visual aspect of this project. Can you tell us more about this image of Fellows Court in Shoreditch?

TA: We found this site near to a couple of others on Hackney Road, near to Old Street. When you really have to wrestle with a picture to make it work, it sometimes becomes a picture of that struggle between your ego and the reality you’re photographing. This picture just worked, without a fight. Perhaps it represents something about the huge change the war caused, both in terms of architecture and planning, but also in terms of ideas and visions for Britain. The bombing was an act of destruction, but ultimately also of creation.

Is there a particular theme you wish to emphasise within ‘Missing Buildings’?

TA: For us, the main interest is in mythology. The Blitz is a profound moment in the story and mythology of Britain and Britishness. We hope that, looking beyond the surface level, our pictures point at that.

What do you mean by “the mythology of Britain and Britishness”?

TA: By that I mean the national story - the narrative which Britain derives its identity from. The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, described myth as being like a group dream. Just as the individual’s dreams interpret and process events, so a society dreams collectively, giving meaning to and coming to terms with its past.

You seem to have adopted the deadpan aesthetic within this body of work. Why did you choose to photograph this way?

TA: I’m not sure it was necessarily a rational decision, rather we just found ourselves doing it and felt right about it. Looking back, it has a certain kind stoicism and reserve which fits. I think there’s also something desolate about it. People are absent in the pictures - the buildings and the gaps become subjects or portraits. To me, it feels like the morning after an air raid - surveying the damage.

You founded your own publishing house, Hwæt Books, in 2014. ‘Missing
Buildings’ is your first imprint. What inspired you to set up Hwæt Books?

TA: Hwæt Books was founded as a way to self publish ‘Missing Buildings’ and, potentially, other future books I want to make. I’m interested in Britain and in mythology. That interest has been around long enough now that I don’t think it’s going away. Hwæt is the first word in the Anglo Saxon epic poem Beowulf - it means something like “Listen” or “Hark” or “So”. It’s an introduction to a story. It fits with the ideas I find myself interested in. Actually, I’ve enjoyed publishing so much that I’m thinking about trying to publish other photographers’ books. I like the idea of a small but well curated bookshelf full of photobooks about Britain and England. Perhaps just one book every year or two. If I can find a way to do it right, I’d like to do it, but we’ll see.

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

TA: We shot ‘Missing Buildings’ on a 5x4 view camera. It’s become a cliché to say it, but I think we both appreciate the slowness and deliberateness which this brings to making pictures.

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

TA: My own influences have been very important to me - heroes really. I assisted a photographer called John Spinks for several years. It was a relationship which changed everything for me. He’s building up to publish some wonderful work in the next few years, which has been in the making for half a lifetime. I’m in awe of it.

Three books of photography that you recommend?

TA: ‘Small Wars’ by An My Le, ‘Working From Memory’ by William Christenberry, and ‘The River Winter’ by Jem Southam.

Tell us more about projects that you are working on now and plans for the future.

TA: Aside from possible ideas for growing Hwæt Books, we’re both working on projects individually. I’ve been working on another thing about Britain, war mythology and the English landscape. It’s bigger and more complex, so it’s a long term thing. I’m in no rush - it has to be right. I hope to make a book of it, if I can get to the bottom of it.

‘Missing Buildings’ by Thom and Beth Atkinson is out now on Hwæt Books. It was published on 8th October 2015, marking the 75th anniversary year of the London Blitz.

BY PAUL J. CARADONNA AND NICKOLAS M. WASER

All of us naturally filter, break down, and reassemble information as we strive to make sense of the world around us. A biologist observing a landscape may derive from it a graphical figure that summarizes some targeted ecological property; an artist observing the same landscape may produce an image that explores qualities of form and color. Although these perspectives seem very different, they share an intersection that sheds light on how humans interpret nature and also on our role as part of nature. Mark Dorf’s ‘Emergence’ series explores this intersection, challenging our assumptions about information, communication, and perception of nature.

Images of the book ‘Emergence’ by Mark Dorf

Much of Dorf’s inspiration for ‘Emergence’ came from a residency at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) during the summer of 2015, as part of RMBL’s Art-Science Exchange. The RMBL is a remote biological research station situated high in the mountains of western Colorado, USA. From June through August it is home to over 100 scientists from around the world who study the surrounding ecosystems. At the RMBL Dorf collaborated with scientists in forests, streams, and meadows, assisting with the setup of projects and the collection of data. He was inspired to contemplate how we scientists perceive nature and how our methods influence our understanding of it.

The Scientific Process

One of the things that Dorf investigates in ‘Emergence’ is the scientific process itself. Generally speaking, a scientist begins with an interest in a broad topic, let us say ‘ecosystem function’. But he or she quickly narrows the focus to a specific aspect of the landscape, perhaps a series of small plots of ground in which to study interactions between plants and insect pollinators. Within Emergent #22, #23, and #24, Dorf explores the transitional flow of this process through colors that fade into and out of the surrounding forest landscapes, mirroring the musings of the scientist. The colors tend to be harsh and artificial; arguably this captures harsh and artificial aspects of the transition between overall properties of an ecosystem and its dissection at fine scales—a dissection that is nonetheless necessary for scientific understanding.

In Emergent #15, #16, #17, #18, #19, and #20, Dorf asks us to reflect upon a common pitfall of the scientific process. Ideally a scientist retains and frequently revisits a larger picture of nature even as he or she focuses on a specific part, allowing ever-changing nature to constantly refresh his or her perception and assumptions. But this ideal is not always met. Here Dorf sets images of the landscape within a backdrop of colors, blurring parts of the images to draw our attention to other parts. These pieces bring to mind the danger of viewing nature through a preconceived conceptual “lens” while failing to question whether the conceptual framework is appropriate or useful. Under this ‘hyperfocal’ scenario the scientist is likely to lose the self-reinforcing and self-correcting transitional flow of the scientific process, to the detriment of final understanding.

Transformation of Information

The scientific process can be credited with our current systematic and practical understanding of natural processes in the world that surrounds us. We biologists take for granted that we are masters of this powerful process, but how often do we consider our transformation of information as we explore nature? Not only do we distill measurements of natural phenomena into graphical figures, but we also transform the measured numbers into other related numbers as part of our statistical analysis of results. In such ways the actual biological information—the organisms, experiments, and measurements—is changed into something new.

Dorf collects information via photographs of the landscape and then applies his own transformation based on light contained within each photograph. In Mesh Translation #2, #3, and #4 each photographic pixel is evaluated for its underlying brightness value, and the brightest values become tall ‘peaks’ in a three-dimensional image whereas the darkest become deep ‘valleys’. The triplet of landscapes that are represented in these pieces remain mysterious to us, but the pieces retain distinctions of bright sky and dark shadow that also distinguish the originals. In fact, the distinctions are accentuated by the transformation, illustrating how transformation at its best can make comparisons that might interest us easier to see. With Emergent #10 and #11 Dorf applies a different algorithm, arranging all colored pixels in order of their underlying gray scale values. The resulting pattern is presented along with the original and proves to be an unrecognizable version of it, in spite of the simple transforming algorithm. In contrast to ‘Mesh Translation’, then, initial patterns appear to be lost, and a warning emerges about transformation at its worst instead of best. This provides a cautionary note to scientists: the transformation of information that we do almost automatically has potential both to reveal and to obscure and confuse.

Reassembly of a Fractured Landscape

At the RMBL Dorf was struck by how the scientists tended to fracture large questions into smaller pieces and then sought an understanding of the whole by some reassembly of the pieces. To explore this process he amassed images of landscape features and then reassembled these into new landscapes. The resulting Reassemblage #1, #2, and #3 again provide insight into the scientific study of nature. For example, Reassemblage #3 depicts a mountain that seems natural and idyllic. In fact, it is idyllic: its triangular shape and snow-covered ridges emulate the mountain that a child might draw. But on close examination the mountain is wrong in many ways: the geology is impossible, the patterns of snow cover are nonsensical, and the plants grow in unnatural ways—who accepts that trees grow sideways? The models that we scientists assemble share these features. Their simplicity helps us to identify important features of the natural system they represent, but they are likely to be subtly incorrect or incomplete in numerous ways. The key is to recognize the value while resisting the impulse to replace nature with our model of it in our further thoughts.

Science & Art

The two of us were intrigued by the response of RMBL scientists to Mark Dorf’s work. We sensed occasional skepticism and lack of connection, but most of the scientists agreed that ‘Emergence’ forced them to reflect in constructive ways on what they were doing. To us this vindicates the idea of scientists making space, in both a physical and mental sense, to interact with artists. And although we emphasize here what the scientists can learn, we are certain that the exchange is bidirectional.

* Paul CaraDonna is a botanist, ecologist, and a creative problem solver. He conducts his research at the University of Arizona (Tucson), the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), and the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (Colorado). He is fascinated by nature, especially by the myriad of ways in which species interact with one another. He views art and science as two complimentary approaches to understand the world that surrounds us.

* Nick Waser counts a number of scientists in his family tree and also a number of artists. The common spirituality inherent in science and art seems clear to him, and he has long been fascinated by ways in which the two endeavors inform one another and share the same creative source. He holds a PhD degree in ecology and genetics and is Professor of Biology Emeritus at the University of California Riverside and Adjunct Professor at the University of Arizona. He splits his time between Colorado and Arizona, where he studies the pollination of flowers by bumble bees and hummingbirds—and paints watercolors of western landscapes—both plein-air.

Emergence by Mark Dorf
In the In-Between Editions, Volume I
FEATURES, PUBLICATIONS, EDITIONS
Publication: October 2015
Edition Size: 150
Dimensions: 9.5″x 8″
Number of Pages: 48 pages
Number of Images: 18 images
Info HERE

BY PETER WATERSCHOOT

Misty Sunday hometown. A couch and a blanket. Baby in bed. 3 hours of traveling without traveling. Two recent Belgian photobooks as a guide, both exploring eastern directions. The titles: ‘Horsehead Nebula’ by Matthieu Litt and ‘Nobody likes to be hindered by worldly Troubles’ by Franky Verdickt. Two photobooks ideal for Sunday-sofa surfers, made by weathered travelers.

Nobody likes to be hindered by worldly Troubles

Frankie Verdickt has traveled several times to South Korea in order to portray this somewhat enigmatic peninsular half-a-country. The photographer seems to have fully immersed while absorbing seascapes, tourists, shopping malls, animals in the street, park life, young couples, under the bridge, pinewood, buildings. This multitude of impressions is even enhanced by the accompanying, mesmerizing soundtrack. A wonderful idea, not often used, but it certainly brings a whole new dimension to the photobook if one goes through the effort of listening to even some of the online soundscapes which mingle so naturally with the placid, extremely well composed pictures. The soundtrack ties the book together, it fits like peas in a pod. Many of the sound fragments are translated afterwards, which results in a small booklet and mid-pages with text; these conversations are funny/philosophical reflections; echoing the 4 religions which determine South Korea; Nature (shamanism), Buddhism, Christianity, and Capitalism. I really enjoyed listening to these sounds and voices and loved reading the excerpts; an ideal mental-travel-experience. Throughout the book, the reader keeps discovering photo gems, all of the photos bathe in an extremely well used big (probably soft box) flashlight (hard and soft at the same time). Clearly Verdickt is no lazybones, he doesn’t mind a bit of carrying equipment. The result is all over in a very dramatic effect and a tremendously poignant outline in the composition. The pictures intrinsically appreciate the reality of everyday life, utterly enhanced by the poetry of a photographer’s emotional connection with even the smallest of details; the epitome of the metaphysical experience of traveling. Bookwise one remark; browsing back and forth, as well as slow pacing through the book, I wonder if the bookdesign didn’t get the better of some really good pictures, which creates a bit of frustration, but then again, that same feeling keeps you going to and fro. An intriguing photobook anyways, and moreover, again, a new extension to a continuously growing intriguing oeuvre.

Horsehead Nebula

Matthieu Litt presents us an untouched region. With vast plains and many horses. It is quickly understood that this must be former USSR, probably Kirgizia, Tajikistan, and/or Kazakhstan, although Matthieu Litt doesn’t want to disclose the exact locations himself. Which is great. It adds mystery and universality to the images. It becomes a non-defined area of ‘reverie’ powered with huge chunks of fresh air. The pictures are shy and silently following each other in a very humble style. You experience silence all over. The images are tending towards bleached monochromes at times, a very subtle color-palette constructed by the author. The internet’s tourist photos of these same landscapes look a whole lot different! The subtly designed photobook treats you on all around bleakness and vast, meditative landscapes, altered with fresh pastel interiors and touching still-lifes. The strength of this photobook is certainly its modest but elegant appearance, as well in size as in rhythm.

‘Horsehead Nebula’ has become a very surprising small sized achiever, and is just like ‘Nobody likes to be hindered by worldly Troubles’ an honest result of intensive traveling and observation with authentic interest/preoccupation for a somewhat less tourist-trodden region on the face of this damaged earth.

An ideal book-combo for any given sofa surfer, realized by real time, old school explorers - with a very differing, but both eloquent, photographic language.
Additional reading for aforementioned romantic couch potatoes: 'The art of Travel’ by Alain De Botton.

BY STEVE BISSON

© Erwin Blumenfeld, cover of Vogue Magazine, 1945 ‘Do your part for the Red Cross’

I recently met with Klaus Fructhnis, our contributor editor for France. Klaus is Chair of Photography at Paris College of Art. He is an educator and attentive observer of trends and developments in photography. So it’s always a good chance to talk with him. This time we focused on an issue that we do not tackle often on Urbanautica: fashion. Yet we are concerned. Why? New developments in technology are making us somewhat more careful in the way we appear rather than look. Compared to the past where our images were bound to more intimate family album or our secret drawers, today, everything is turned outside. Furthermore let’s not forget that many photographers eke out a living with commercial work often related to the fashion industry. So I’ve asked Klaus to talked a bit about the Master in Fashion Film and Photography at PCA.

Klaus Fructhnis (KF): Paris, like Milan and London, is doubtlessly a fashion capital that plays a key role in the world of fashion, as suggested by the many fashion photography agencies, magazines, fashion designers brand, fashion weeks, etc., It’s a vibrant international market for fashion photographers. Furthermore, the international dimension of both the city and Paris College of Art provide a unique platform for students who would aspire to experience an internship or work abroad.

© Erwin Blumenfeld (1897–1969) was a photographer and artist born in Germany. He was best known for his fashion photography published in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar in the 1940s and 1950s. In addition to fashion photography, he produced an extensive body of celebrity portraiture, fine-art photography (including black and white nudes), drawings, and Dada collages. [Source: Wikipedia]

Tell us about the Master of Arts (MA) in Fashion Film and Photography at PCA

KF: The Master of Arts (MA) in Fashion Film and Photography is a one-year program in Photography with a specific focus on fashion, aimed at emerging photographers interested in specializing in fashion. Professional practice of fashion photographers today increasingly includes film, so moving image will be taught alongside still. The proposed MA meets the demands of an expanding market for fashion advertising through storytelling in photography and film, using social media and capitalizing on the ability to reach large audiences at reduced cost through online marketing. Many young fashion brands rely entirely on films distributed online, and festivals devoted to fashion films, like the one pioneered in Paris by Diane Pernet, and this phenomenon is doubtlessly growing.

© Richard Avedon, ‘Martha Graham with the Martha Graham Dance Company, New York, 1961. [Source: Richard Avedon Foundation].

Students with an undergraduate background in photography and demonstrated technical skills (black & white and color photography, light, common software programs for editing) will be considered for admission. The program combines technical knowledge and principles of photography/film research and theory. Studio classes and workshops conducted by professionals emphasize the mastery of contemporary techniques and professional practices, while theory-based and methodology courses help students develop their personal creative visions. Thanks to internships during the fashion weeks held in Paris several times a year, students will be well prepared to enter the job market and will have started to create a professional network.

Students specialize in photography/film, choosing to produce a final portfolio of either still or moving images, while at the same time continuing to broaden their knowledge and skills through supportive art & design courses and electives. Since graduates are expected to join the job market upon graduation, the focus of the program is on studio and research, rather than on scholarship and preparation for teaching.

How is this program cutting edge in contrast to other MA/MFA programs?

KF: The cutting edge curriculum emphasizes practiced-based learning and focuses on personal and professional development. The program combines technical knowledge and principles of photography & film research and theory. Studio classes and workshops conducted by active and prestigious professionals emphasize the mastery of contemporary techniques and professional practices, while theory-based and methodology courses help students develop their personal creative visions. Thanks to internships during the fashion weeks held in Paris several times a year, students will be well prepared to enter the job market and will have started to create a professional worldwide network.

What is the range of disciplines from which the students will be pooled?

KF: We seek to have a highly diverse student group. Candidates from backgrounds including art, editorial, photography and film are all encouraged to apply.

© Richard Avedon, Magazine ‘Egoïste’ No.10‚ Andy Warhol, Paris, 1987

How do you know if the program is right for you?

KF: This one-year program is for students and emerging professionals who want to specialize in fashion and moving image. The proposed MA meets the demand of an expanding market for fashion advertising through storytelling in photography and film, using social media and capitalizing on the ability to reach large audiences for a reduced cost through online marketing. If you’re interested in new communication channels in the fashion industry and learning and working in the capital of fashion that is Paris, this is a program for you.

What are the prerequisites?

KF: The program is open to any applicant who has successfully completed an undergraduate degree (BFA, BA, BSc, BID, BArch, etc.) with a studio component, or acquired basic technical skills (photography, video, editorial, editing software, printing, lighting, etc.) through other educational or professional experiences. Your previously acquired technical skills and creative potential will be evaluated through your portfolio.

© Annie Leibovitz, John Lenon & Yoko Ono, New York, 1980. On December 8, 1980, Leibovitz had a photo shoot with John Lennon for Rolling Stone, and she promised him he would make the cover.[9] She had initially tried to get a picture with just Lennon alone, as Rolling Stone wanted, but Lennon insisted that both he and Yoko Ono be on the cover. Leibovitz then tried to re-create something like the kissing scene from the couple’s Double Fantasy 1980 album cover, a picture Leibovitz loved, and she had John remove his clothes and curl up next to Yoko on the floor. Leibovitz recalls, “What is interesting is she said she’d take her top off and I said, ‘Leave everything on'‍—‌not really preconceiving the picture at all. Then he curled up next to her and it was very, very strong. You couldn’t help but feel that he was cold and he looked like he was clinging on to her. I think it was amazing to look at the first Polaroid and they were both very excited. John said, 'You’ve captured our relationship exactly. Promise me it’ll be on the cover.’ I looked him in the eye and we shook on it.”[10] Leibovitz was the last person to professionally photograph Lennon‍—‌he was shot and killed five hours later. [Source: Wikipedia]

What is the advantage of enrolling in this program in its first year?

KF: The boldest ideas are generally implemented first. Fashion film & photography evolve and its codes constantly change over time, and waiting for the program to mature means you are missing the opportunity to get involved now. Faculty will work all the harder to mold the program to the needs of individual students in the first year. The faculty in the program are well-established fashion photographers and professionals in Paris, and have substantial teaching experience (Michael Daks, Ana Bloom, Tatiana Grigorenko, Susan Bright, Lily Templeton, among others.)

Are there other graduate students at PCA?

KF: PCA launched the MA/MFA in Transdisciplinary New Media in fall 2015, and is launching a total of 4 new MA programs in 2016 (in addition to this MA in Fashion Film and Photography: MA in Accessories Design: Jewelry and Leather Goods; MA in Fashion Design: New Materials & Technologies; and MA in Interior Design). PCA also collaborates with Toulouse Business School in offering English language MSc degrees in marketing and communication specializing in the fashion and luxury industries; and with the French engineering school École de Ponts in offering English language Master’s degrees in Computational Design These programs draw student from around the world to the PCA campus.

© The 1969 Pirelli calendar photographed by Harri Peccinotti. Harry Peccinotti (also known as Harri Peccinotti) (born 1935) is an English photographer, best known for his erotic work, most famously two Pirelli Calendars published in 1968 and 1969. He remains an influential figure in art and fashion photography. His work as art director of the UK fashion magazine Nova is widely considered as being influential for its graphic design as well as photography.He published a retrospective of his life’s work called book HP (2009). [Source: Wikipedia]

What are concrete projects students can expect to complete?

KF: This program focuses on technical skills and cognitive needs that arise from the continuous development of the fashion industry. Students will be able to:

Create fashion films and advertising campaigns, look books, catalogues and window displays;
Conceive and produce fashion shoots and films (model direction, lighting techniques, editing, concept and storytelling);
Coordinate the creation of photo editorials, both printed and online;
Manage a team, discussing and integrating the work of other professionals such as fashion stylists, make-up artists and art directors for the creation of work charged with aesthetic content;
Create blogs and online magazines in order to use social media and capitalizing on the ability to reach large audiences for a reduced cost through online marketing.
Respond to professional commissions.

How do faculty facilitate the collaborative work?

KF: Our PCA faculty, all active professionals, is best suited to impart the skills and knowledge required to prepare students to enter a rapidly changing professional world. They facilitate much the way a project manager would-by having a weekly meeting to make sure everyone is working towards a commonly defined goal. Then they break down to smaller teams/individuals to define milestones and address any difficulties.

© Colors Magazine. ‘Extraordinary Fashion’, Issue #38. An unusual cover. A fashion photo taken by Patrick Demarchelier for a double issue about fashion. It was also Oliviero Toscani’s last issue. But it wasn’t a contradiction of the magazine’s core values (no news, no fashion, no famous people) rather an anthropological and visual trip through different ways people dress around the world. [Source: Colors Magazine]

What are the faculty’s credentials?

KF: Their expertise lies in Fashion and Film Photography, Still Life Photography, Intellectual Property, Professional Business Practices, Film Production, Fashion Editorial, Advanced Printing Techniques, Concept and Storytelling, Art Direction and Marketing.

What are the expected outcomes in terms of employability?

KF: Students graduating from the Master in Fashion Film and Photography would be prepared to enter the international job market with specific knowledge and skills in photography and film, but also with a greater understanding of the fashion market and its associated professions. The combination of studio work, research, and professional practice preparation will enable graduates to apply for positions as independent or salaried photographers and videographers, art directors, creative directors, editors, or communications and advertising bureaus.

© Jesse Frohman, ‘Kurt Kobain and Nirvana’. While earning a degree in economics at the University of Michigan, Jesse Frohman picked up a camera and never put it down. When he returned home to New York, he had no formal training or experience, but he did have a portfolio of platinum prints, which caught the interest of legendary photographer Irving Penn, who hired Jesse to manage his studio.It was an incomparable apprenticeship. To the techniques and aesthetics he leaned from Penn, Jesse added his own sensibilities of strength, dignity and quiet energy, all of which are evident in his pictures.Jesse has photographed countless celebrities and still lifes. In addition to his work for magazines, advertising, and recording companies, he has been commissioned to create two award-winning photographic books. His work is also in many private collections.Jesse lives and works in New York. [Source: Jesse Frohman]

What types of projects and companies will alumni be prepared for?

KF: PCA has closely established links with industry and other partners through past industry sponsorship agreements with companies such as L’Oreal, Hermes, Shiseido, Galeries Lafayette, Les Compagnons du Devoir, Promod and more. Our career services office assists students with securing internships. New links are sought and explored, to provide fashion film and photography students with a pertinent professional network. If freelancing/entrepreneurship is not your cup of tea, alumni will be able to work in a whole slew of fields like creative direction (e.g., Vogue, Marie Claire, Dazed, The Independent, Cosmopolitan), fashion editorial (e.g., Elle, A Magazine Curated By, Harper’s Bazaar, Large, Style Magazine), and communications and advertising bureaus (e.g., Publicis Worldwide, Aquent).

© David LaChapelle, ‘Pietà with Courtney Love’. David LaChapelle is known internationally for his exceptional talent in combining a unique hyper-realistic aesthetic with profound social messages.LaChapelle’s photography career began in the 1980’s when he began showing his artwork in New York City galleries. His work caught the eye of Andy Warhol, who offered him his first job as a photographer at Interview Magazine. His photographs of celebrities in Interview garnered positive attention, and before long he was shooting for a variety of top editorial publications and creating some of the most memorable advertising campaigns of his generation. In 2006, LaChapelle decided to minimize his participation in commercial photography, and return to his roots by focusing on fine art photography. Since then, he has been the subject of exhibitions in both commercial galleries and leading public institutions around the world. [Source: David LaChapelle]

What will students have in terms of a portfolio by the end of the program(s)? Is a portfolio even the right way to look at the end result?

KF: Upon graduation, students are expected to have achieved demonstrable skills in fashion film and photography image capturing and editing, an understanding of applied research methodologies, and increased teamwork and management skills. They will have practiced talking about their skills and competencies with professional employers and clients. The final portfolio is an original and coherent set of images that focus on still or moving images, or contain a combination of the two. At least one project in each medium (photography and video) is required. Students will also have a list of projects, generally visible online, likely talked about in blogs and journals.

Founded in 1981, Paris College of Art (PCA) is a private university in Paris, France. The university is a US degree granting institution of higher learning and is accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD). PCA’s mission is to provide the highest standard of art and design education, taught within an American pedagogical paradigm, while being influenced and informed by our French and European environment. Our international faculty is comprised of 100 leaders in the art, design, and business industries in Europe and courses are taught in English. PCA offers an interdisciplinary education for students coming from 50 different countries, and awards Bachelor’s degrees in: Accessories Design; Art History, Theory & Criticism; Communication Design; Design Management; Fashion Design; Film / Video; Fine Arts; Illustration; Industrial Design; Interior Design; and Photography. The university also offers Master’s degrees in Transdisciplinary New Media as well as study abroad, certificate, and summer programs. Additional information is available here.

PCA | urbanautica France

ILMA GUIDEROLI. PANORAMA _ LOTAÇÃO

EDOARDO HAHN. LANDSCAPE MATERIALS

MICHEL VAEREWIJCK. LIMITS OF REASON

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ALEXIS VASILIKOS. ENERGETIC EDITING

PAULINE MIKÓ. A PROJECT FOR LATER

MIKE READ. BOUNDLESS PLAINS

HELIO LEÓN. INTO THE PURPLE ROOM

MARC LATHUILLIÈRE. A STEREOTYPE HUNTER

PETER HOLLIDAY. WHERE THE LAND RISES

BORIS ELDAGSEN. THE POEMS

JEFF LAM POK YIN. ABOUT CAMERA ITSELF

JAN KEMPENAERS. MODERN RUINS

PETROS KOUBLIS. IN DREAMS

MISSING BUILDINGS. THOM AND BETH ATKINSON

EMERGENCE: TRANSFORMATION AND REASSEMBLY OF A FRACTURED LANDSCAPE

THE ART OF TRAVEL

PCA COVERS FASHION FILM AND PHOTOGRAPHY