Monthly Archive for June, 2009

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My Hellsten – Fjällkor

A few years ago I fell deeply in love with the white mountain cows of Tännäs, the village of my grandparents. This is a small village in the province of Härjedalen, in the north of Sweden. During the summer and the early autumn months, the cows and their calves move around on a fairly large area with meadows and a forest. I became curious and fascinated by them and I soon felt an urge to investigate what they where doing, for example in the middle of the night in the forest. Since that first summer I am following them with my camera during days as well as nights, from early summer until the first snow falls, usually in October.

After having spent so much time with the cows they have gotten used to have me around and I have come to know them as individuals and discovered how different they are from each other in terms of character and temperament.

The project is ongoing and I am looking forward to continue photographing them.

Bio

My Hellsten was born in 1976 and lives in Stockholm, Sweden. She graduated with a BA in Graphic Design and Illustration from Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in 2003 and she received her MFA from the same university 2005. During 2002 she studied one semester at California College of Arts, San Francisco, USA, as an exchange student. Since graduation she has been working both with graphic design and photography.

Her work has been exhibited in Sweden and internationally. In 2007 she was selected for Peek 2007, Festival of emerging photographers, by Art+Commerce, New York, and a selection of the photographs was presented in Capricious Magazine #7 edited by Art+Commerce. In 2008 she exhibited at the Backlight International Photographic Triennial, Tampere, Finland, and in 2009 at Fotofestiwal, International Festival of Photography in Lodz, Poland. In 2009 she was nominated for the Leopold Godowsky, Jr. Color Photography Award, and in July 2009 her work will be shown at the Voies Off Festival in Arles, France.

Photographs: My Hellsten
Website: http://myhellsten.se

Editor’s Note: Please only one comment per person under this essay.. Further discussions should take place under Dialogue..

Many thanks… david alan harvey

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AIDS Orphans in Sub-Saharan Africa

By 2010, sub-Saharan Africa will be home to an estimated 20 million orphaned children. Because of HIV/AIDS, the number of AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa is spiraling upward—increasing exponentially—rather than declining. In Uganda, where half the population is under 15, the number of orphans is projected to rise, as parents already infected continue to die from the disease. According to UNICEF, “The staggering number of African children already orphaned due to AIDS is only the beginning of a crisis of gargantuan proportions… the worst is yet to come.”

It is in response to these statistics that in 2006, I traveled to remote villages in Uganda and began documenting families whose lives have been touched by HIV/AIDS. It is these AIDS orphans who have left an indelible impression upon my heart. Bearing witness to their struggle to survive, I feel accountable to them. That said, it would have been impossible to see what I have seen and walk away—I wholeheartedly feel as though I was introduced to these children for a reason, and am overwhelmed by the feeling that I was born to tell their stories.

My work in 2008/09 has centered around one family who live in a remote rural village in the Rakai district of Uganda, the original epicenter of the AIDS pandemic. The family consists of eleven children, five of whom are AIDS orphans.

Here, I introduce to you Lydia, Molly, Nasta, Hallen, Scovia, James, Eddie, Dennis, Jackie, Agnes, Elliott and friends, brave souls who have allowed me to step into their hearts and lives.

Photographs: Anna Boyiazis
Website: www.annaboyiazis.com

Editor’s Note: Please only one comment per person under this essay.. Further discussions should take place under Dialogue..

Many thanks… david alan harvey

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Richard Pak – Pursuit

US of A, 2003-2009.

A project created over a six year period, Pursuit is the disenchanted chronicle of an idealized America. Being a keen admirer of American literature, cinema and painting, I created my own fancied-America, a not-so-imaginary place filled with fictional heroes. The purpose of this work is to juxtapose a mental construction to the reality of the American everyday life and to picture the “American experience” as a metaphor for a bigger experience. In my photographs I mean to suggest rather than describe, translate life’s small dramas into something timeless and universal.

The title Pursuit echoes the United States Declaration of Independence stating every American’s right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. This work is a visual journal of a chimerical quest:  happiness, granted as a constitutional right.

Photographs: Richard Pak
Website: www.richardpak.fr

Editor’s Note: Please only one comment per person under this essay.. Further discussions should take place under Dialogue..

Many thanks… david alan harvey

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Alessandro Penso – Born Kings

This work springs from the attempt to explore the human and emotional background of a galaxy showing itself irreverent and proud to exist: the bursting and rebellious Queer community.

From the first Italian “gay pride” to the conquest of real and proper meetings, both at the local and national levels, this exuberant movement, the result of different stories and souls, has looked for a thread with a common language, speaking, above all, about the right to exist. So, in this work, the body becomes the protagonist, the soul and instrument for this assertion. As in “Born Kings” shows, stereotypes are overcome by means of the same stereotypes and, with slashing irony, a temporary identity is sought, to be discarded after a few minutes. The moments preceding the exhibitions are recurrent and it is exactly there that the complexity at the bottom of my research is to be found. The glances emerging from the masks artfully created to frame them and never to hide them are superimposed to the muscles that contract while in the shadows loneliness and affection emerge.

—

The work started in the spring of 2007, when I met Julia and Ivona. They were starting a “drag king” performance in Italy. For almost two years, whenever it was possible, I followed them in Rome, Milan, Bologna, Latin and Berlin. During this time I chose to add the various artists that I met to my work as well. The performers like J. and I. choose to use their body as an expressive and communication form. Recently, the work evolved into looking for all forms of body communication, like extreme body art or bondage.

I consider this a work in progress, as I am aware that in different cultures the diverse perceptions of the body and communication, and also that time may change both social and expressive needs. I hope to have the possibility to continue this project.

This essay is taking part in “Descubrimientos”, the “international discoveries” competition at Photoespaña in June 2009.

Photographs: Alessandro Penso
Website: www.alessandropenso.com

Editor’s Note: Please only one comment per person under this essay.. Further discussions should take place under Dialogue..

Many thanks… david alan harvey

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Marina Black – Versts

“Anyone parted from his land will weep seven years.
Whoever is parted from his tribe will weep until he dies.”
Central Asian Proverb

I came to Canada at the age of 28, not knowing a word of English. I never felt comfortable expressing myself in this language. However, photography has given me a voice. The camera has allowed me to “listen to” and re-examine, in their photographic retelling, my Russian memories, to sail back into the world that had seemed lost to me while I struggled with my new life and new identity in Canada.

My photographs have never lost their sense of ‘Russian-ness’, however, new experiences, encounters with people in Canada have profoundly affected my photographic work,  I began concentrating on the topics of identity and memory,  human suffering  in their relationship to land, as well as the understanding of mortality and psychological limitations. It made me reconsider my relationship to Russia. Increasingly, I experience more and more empathy to its people and their tormented moments of history. I have the sense that these moments made Russian people acutely aware of time passing, of time as a substance, when one could only be anxious, or terrified. It also made me think of the time outside of these events, molded by extraordinary Russian novelists, poets, composers.

These moments of history are in my subliminal presence when I am photographing or putting my pictures together. More and more do I want to photograph outside of time, independent of the present and my environment that I mistook for a home,  and reflect  the atmosphere of the past on peoples faces and places.  When I return to Russia to visit, I often feel overwhelmed. Everywhere I look, I find the traces of its distressed history, its its rich but frantic culture. It is astonishing to find Russia in the predicament from making history to be caught in it.    I become particularly aware of time. My consciousness is disturbed, ghostly reflecting the memory of those who have lived there before. I follow my own footsteps, haunt my former life akin to people who have been in a car accident and lost all their memory and now they are returned to a life they no longer recognize as their own. The process of my photography is one of layering the pictures like palimsets, cutting up the cityscapes and dusting them off as in archeology, as if juxtaposing past and present and embracing both.

The Versts (Версты) project is a direct development from my previous work and exploration of themes of migration, the fragile nature of memory and identity and how it aids in the construction of a subjective personal history in relation to physical traces and photography. I would like to produce a body of work akin to an excavation site, the photographs, which would connect me to the time when I felt a affiliation to place I used to call “home” and strong sense of identity, broken with immigration. I plan to photograph throughout Russia in order to make a pictorial record of things that once constituted my identity, Russian or Soviet, personal, historical, cultural, environmental. I hope to capture the expression of it on the experiential and spiritual level, rather than the documentation of life in Russia at this particular moment.

–Marina Black, 2009

Photographs: Marina Black
Website: www.marinablack.com

Editor’s Note: Please only one comment per person under this essay.. Further discussions should take place under Dialogue..

Many thanks… david alan harvey

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THIS ESSAY CONTAINS NUDITY

Cristina Faramo – In the Mood for Love
Emerging Photographer Fund – FINALIST (number eleven of eleven)

My photography explores aesthetic mood, personal experimentation and life.

My project, “In the Mood for Love,” examines the celebration of love through the intimacy of couples. I recently started making photos of couples during their daily life: when they are working, sharing private moments, experiencing pain, anger or joy, and when they are passionate.

Passion is love. Passion is a feeling, a force, an energy more powerful than ourselves. This power has a determining effect on our lives every day. Through my focus on couples and use of diverse visual aesthetics, I seek understanding about the nature of our instincts and our more primitive personalities. I capture moments that occur naturally in front of me.

Every day we live with tumultuous impulses and passions that drive us but this intensity doesn’t always find its way out of our mind and body. Many people dream to live in intimate and passionate relationships where we wish for something powerful, exciting and invigorating that distracts us from the everyday realities of life. We dream passion can bring us to places unknown and give us the opportunity to live the emotions and feelings of our dreams, to live with more intensity.

However, passion does not always appear in positive ways. It may also bring moments of severe drama or darkness to the surface. In this most intimate space, we see who we are in the most raw, complex and exposed aspects of existence.

The evolution of our feelings allows us to explore beyond the boundaries of what is known about ourselves. This is an exploration for us through the feelings of sensuality, intimacy and love.

I plan to continue this project by making more photographs of diverse couples from different cultures.

Bio:

My photography explores aesthetic mood, personal experimentation and life. I studied at the Academy of Art in Catania, Sicily and worked for two years as a photography assistant and photographer in a commercial studio in Catania.

I am currently involved in several long-term projects. “In the Mood for Love” is about the celebration of love through the intimacy of couples. “Time in Prison” explores the emotions of the detainees when living locked in small spaces and how their soul is affected during time in a Sicilian prison. This project has been published in Vision Magazine, China, March 2009.

Photographs: Cristina Faramo
Website: www.cristinafaramo.com

Editor’s Note: Please only one comment per person under this essay.. Further discussions should take place under Dialogue..

Many thanks… david alan harvey

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THIS ESSAY CONTAINS NUDITY

Victor Cobo – American Dreams
Emerging Photographer Fund – FINALIST (number eight of eleven)

American Dreams is a complex, anthropological tour through the landscape of the indigenous Central American – by means of memory, spirituality, longing and isolation.

Lives are concentrated with a vibrancy, an intensity of being that many of us have never experienced. The under-represented reality between fiction and objective thought.  An existence akin to a world fueled and charged by love and loss, by commitment to family and the need for survival at all costs.  One that cannot be bound by laws from political systems on either side of the border.  Often this human drama is intensified with its reflection of deprivation.  Yes, there is struggle.  There is also joy, and the life of a dream, of opening a pathway heretofore unacknowledged in American society.  It is here that the viewer is urged to ponder the relationship between the real and the surreal or imagined, and to question their own existence in comparison to that of the subjects’.

Perhaps a brief journey through this stream of consciousness will remind the American public and their politicians of the fundamental humanity shared between themselves and the immigrants, whose lives have become such political playthings.

Bio:

Victor Cobo (b. 1971) is a self-taught photographer from San Francisco who comes from an artistic family, and was originally trained in painting and life-drawing.  Cobo grew up in northern California where his earliest memories of photography involved stealing his stepfather’s 35mm point and shoot camera, playing dress up and creating theatrical images with teenage friends.  In 1999 he was sacked from his graphic design job when management discovered inappropriate photographs on his cubicle wall he had taken while wandering the streets of San Francisco during his lunch breaks. Thus began his full time career as a fine art photographer.

Victor Cobo’s work has been reviewed in American Suburb X, Ojo De Pez and Private.  His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Aaron Siskind Permanent Collection and the Amon Carter Museum as well as in many private collections.  In 2007 he won the Aaron Siskinf Foundation IPF
Grant and in 2009 his work was included in “Masters of American Photography” at the Amon Carter Museum in Dallas.

Photographs: Victor Cobo
Website: www.victorcobo.com

Editor’s Note: Please only one comment per person under this essay.. Further discussions should take place under Dialogue..

Many thanks… david alan harvey