Author Archive for burn magazine

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Emily Schiffer

Cheyenne River

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In 2005, I founded a photography program for youths on Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota. In this ongoing program, my students and I photograph together, share our images while they’re still in the viewfinder, and operate as both subjects and photographers. Our favorite locations are the fields and abandoned buildings on the fringes of town, forgotten places thick with the past that lend themselves to imaginary games and textured photographs. The absence of an adult presence is evident in both the children’s play and our images. The 500 inhabitants of Dupree, SD are confident in the area’s relative safety. Children explore freely, and develop a community of young people that operates without adult involvement. My images explore play as a vehicle through which youth reveal and negotiate their emotions, traumas, and desires. Children have a unique ability to experience love and joy alongside pain without compartmentalizing their experiences. I seek to convey this complexity. Over the course of four years, my students and I have documented our relationships with one another and this land. The validity and meaning of my images are linked to the shared context of their creation. Therefore, my work will be exhibited alongside the children’s photographs, which present the other parts of the whole. The design of a group exhibition represents the next phase of this program. In summer 2010, I plan to host six committed teenage photographers and two adults in New York City. The purpose of this visit is to expose the youth and elders to ideas of representation: the artist’s intent, and the viewer’s perceptions. We will tour museums and galleries, and meet with artists and curators. This artistic exposure is designed to inspire the creation of a photographic instillation that will enable the viewer to interact with our images and form relationships with our photographic subjects. Currently, my students, their families, and I are engaged in a fundraising campaign to support this next stage. We hope to reach a wide audience at home and abroad.

Bio

B. 1980. In 2003 Emily Schiffer received her BA in Fine Art and African American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2005, she founded the My Viewpoint Youth Photography Initiative on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota, where she continues to teach and shoot. Awards include: the 2010 Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Portraiture, the 2010 winner of the PDN Photo Annual Personal Project Category, the 2009 Inge Morath Award, presented by Magnum Photos and the Inge Morath Foundation, a 2006-2007 Fulbright Fellowship in Photography, and recognition as one of the top ten portfolios for the 2007 Leica Oskar Barnak Award. Emily has exhibited her photographs internationally. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan, Foto Baryo, Philippines, and The Center for Fine Art Photography, US. Emily lives in Brooklyn, NY and is available to work internationally.

Related links

www.MyViewpoint.org

www.emilyschiffer.com

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Jamie Maxtone Graham

When Evening Comes: Night Market Portraits

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The photographs in this body of work came to be out of a couple of different but complimentary impulses.  The first was a simple curiosity of what the Long Bien night market in Hanoi, Vietnam – where I have lived since 2007 – actually looked like at night.  I have often been past the market during the day when it is closed and very little, if anything, is ever happening.  It is, in fact, asleep.  I found it is an entirely different place after night falls.

The second, more personal, challenge for myself was to make photographs in a different mode – both technically and aesthetically – and to engage the subjects, the people who work and even live in the night market, in a manner that required collaboration and ultimately a trust.  I wanted to bring some of the aesthetic of the studio into the street and to do this at night in this venue – a rough wholesale fruit and vegetable market in a tough section of the city near the Red River – seemed both absurd and entirely logical.  I like that kind of friction.

On a separate note, there are a couple of other ideas at work here for me.  In the West, ‘Vietnam’ continually connotes a war long over and other socio-political issues which often seem to sublimate the very “everydayness” of the place.  With as little prejudice as I am capable of, in this series I wanted to just look and be looked back at by people with no more overt agenda than just that.  These people photographed and I developed some relationship both in the moment we made the image and in the weeks I regularly returned, always with their portrait as a gift.  I also had in mind to embrace some tone of a 19^th or early 20^th colonial portraitist (in Indochina they were typically French and I admire a lot of that work) and so I tried to adopt a somewhat neutral distance and attitude with the camera while looking for something that expressed the nuance of this time, these people, this place.

Bio

I have been a cinematographer working originally in New York and then in Los Angeles on feature films, commercials and episodic television but also with strong exposure to documentary and independent films as well. I began coming to Vietnam in 1990 to shoot a documentary and have returned many times in the two decades since on other non-fiction and narrative films and for personal work too.
In 2007-08 I became a Fulbright Research Fellow after receiving a grant funding my proposal to photograph contemporary youth culture in Vietnam. My wife, our young daughter and I continue to live in Hanoi and I have made several other portfolios of photographs in that time (When Evening Comes is the most recent) while pursuing commercial and narrative film work in the region. A selection of this body of work exhibited at The Bui Gallery in Hanoi in February and March, 2010.

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Emily Shevenock

Residence of New Hollows

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Poetry first published December 2009 in 2River

Assertions Gained from a Sensitive Influx, a Series of Sensations, and Detached Expressions and Promptings from the Imagination

[A tiny booklet; defining characteristics on the scenes of the wall and room space]:

Images notate references of the environmental climate, or a foreseen environmental proposition of an allocentric, societal observation re-marking selfhood. The climate simply alludes; contradicts; and/or complements, in variances of subjective through objective response, the scenes within an introverted, solitary self. Depending on color language and subject in a series, the latter sentence may fit in reverse, the image appearing first as the social workings and interpersonal impulses of the human condition, the inner self underlying. However fragmented or “fragmented” the idea of hollow becomes in relation to a binding by societal constraints, inherently it suggests allegorically the inhibiting of the “the artist” and her pulsation of medium. Though, this societal inhibiting should not entirely color, or become the sole factor or foundation intending the context of the book. In someway, there is no intention but to document “erratically” (“irrationally”)¹ then transfer rationally into proper proportions. Proportions reason a project, changing radically from project to project, and through articulation—asymmetry is symmetry where Project 1 is in relation to Project 2, or vice versa. Although wholly contained in their own compartments, language and visuals frequently meld, becoming somewhat inseparable. I stress the melding of language and image just as I stress the document or photograph explained into further details by my inner response –which is not necessarily subjective—but an objective/detached understanding of unseen information² in the environment combined with the understanding of the literal, outer, surface environment. More concisely, this combination reveals [objective] subtext into tangibility. Through additional surface definition to each image, the resulting visual qualities render a series into its complexity. Working with an image series until it “appears correct,” is described above, yet also intuitive. Enhanced through color language (within) or lack of color (without), the work is dealt through multiple series all at once, beginning spontaneously, sometimes predefining the message before taking any [given] image/s, though usually not. The only method always adhered to is the full frame/never cropping. Projects ultimately are layered, and can be viewed in sections, yet layer again into entire books or exhibits, including texts of short fiction and writings. The results form a cohesive, complete work in seamless fragmentation.³

Historical Relevance: Subjectivity or emotion might continually elude intra-historical relevance by appearing instead as objective expression through the immediacy of articulated perception.⁴

I have been writing for quite a long time. Halfway through what life has done yet not fixed, age XV, I used an inherited Japanese Topcon. It was taken to a camera shop once, then broke again and bordered useless. X X X. Artistically, I learned to use what I could, implying only that which allows itself to be used.

—

Notes:

¹ Please note the necessity of placing the erratic and the irrational within quotation marks. Set more singularly [without doing so], the terms are as fit as demeaning the entire rationale of hollows, as they are ever subject to [antiquated] prejudice/s.

² The senses are alluded to here. I make no distinction as to how many; too much theory is simply cheating (theory out of context is sincerely thrilling). Also alluded, [and] in combination are the inter-personal and intra-personal.

³ Ultimately a narrative [cohesiveness] is formed, at times aesthetics and/or content associates, or not. Attempting to differentiate between confused or cohesive in a final work is absurd. To define subtle or “subtle” is the seam [opposite]. Clarification is the penultimate in seamless fragmentation.

⁴ Biography; specifically the artist’s– Please note historical relevance [goes] hollow. This again is allusion to the allegory, but even the allegory negated, it interrupts any intra-binding to rigid boundaries. This is a voluntary; intra-history pauses [during the project] then [perhaps or sometimes] repeats itself during other courses of the non-project.

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Other Shows and Publications from The Residence of New Hollows:

INVISIBLE CITY, ISSUE 4, DANGEROUS BODIES, JULY/AUG 2009
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
5 photographs selected from the essays “Baby Pillow” and “Bard Motel,” www.invisiblecity.org
Online magazine exploring the “contemporary theoretical idea” curated by Marlaina Read

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE, JAN 2009
METRO PICTURES, NEW YORK, NY
4 x 6 ink-jet print, origins of toned silver gelatin, titled Glasses from the series Markings
1/10 sold for Visual AIDS though the gallery auction
2/10 sold by gallery placing me in contact with art collector

Related links

www.emilyshevenock.com

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Dmitry Markov

Awkward Age

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I grew up in a small Russian town in a family of factory workers. The part of the town where I lived was rough: the only available place of work (the factory) had been closed, and as an outcome most of adults drank much and we being left alone lounged away time roaming the streets. We constantly had fights and problems with a school and police. At the age of 16 I wrote an article in a local newspaper about my friends who were doing heroin. The article evoked a wide response and public attention and was rewarded. Thereby I got fascinated with journalism. At the age of 20 my new interest let me leave my native town and helped me to avoid those deplorable consequences which my friends come across with. By that time many of them were not already alive or were put in prison.
In 2005 by chance I visited a boarding school during one of my volunteer trips. In some months’ period I left the job in a newspaper and started working closely as a volunteer with non-commercial organizations and foundations which helped and supported orphans. I was getting on well with the youngsters from the boarding school, most of them had the similar problems I’d experienced when was of the same age.
In summer 2005 I volunteered in a boarding school for disabled children in Pskov region. I was very impressed by the actual state of thing regarding such children, by their hopeless living. Therefore I decided to move to Pskov region to start working with those children. During the next three years we successfully realized several local projects with disabled orphans. Effective 2009 we started a new project “Children’s village” where several elder children from the boarding school are learning to live on their own under the supervision of two tutors.
Looking at my foster children I often recall my own childhood. On the one hand I want to help them to avoid serious mistakes which could ruin or influence their further lives. It is not easy. This is the age when you think you know how to live properly, this is the age when you often ignore advice of the grown-ups. On the other hand I would like to draw the society’s attention to the problems of these children which are sometimes difficult to resolve alone without one’s help and support.

Bio

I was born in 1982, in Moscow region. After finishing school I studied at the Faculty of Philology and actively wrote for youth magazines and newspapers on a voluntary and part-time basis. Being a 3rd year student I left the University as I was proposed a position of a full- time reporter in one of the prints. Later on during four years, I worked in a Russian weekly newspaper “Argumenty i Facty” (Arguments and Facts) where most of my articles were devoted to social issues and youth’ problems.
Nowadays, I am a volunteer of several non-commercial organizations: charitable organization “ROSTOK”, education fund “ROOF”, fund “Detskiedomiki”, the Pskov branch of the “Russian Children’s Fund”, Austrian fund “Kleine Herzen” and several informal volunteer unions. The author of several albums, publications and photo exhibitions dedicated to the problem of orphanage in Russia. I am working as a tutor in the Children’s Village and taking part in the other current projects. We’ve been attracting many volunteers and are actively dealing with the region’s mass media and local social welfare authorities.
I hope that my photos have not the small share in drawing the attention of benefactors, volunteers and journalists. I do hope that they help the society to look at the problems of such children in a humane way.

Related links

dimanah.livejournal.com

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Ryan Gauvin

Deep Roots/Fresh Cut

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I passed my thesis defense on Thursday afternoon and by Sunday I was out of Toronto, driving back across Canada to Vancouver. A week later I was at the golf course where I’d spent the last seven summers cutting grass to pay for two degrees and to fund my documentary photo projects. I still owed around $25,000 for the MFA – about two more summers work. The golf course had been sold to a new company since the last year, but everything was the same. The coffee tasted like machinery, the mud room smelled like a wet dog, and the golfers still looked down on us. I was happy to be back though, amongst friends and away from fine art politics and the commercial bias of news media, both of which I grew frustrated with during my two years in Toronto. I started packing my camera and a pocket full of Tri-X to work with me in the morning, mostly to stay sharp until I could afford to start another project.
Looking at the photos now, I see inklings of something deeper than just pictures of my friends at work, but it’s something I can’t quite put my finger on. My girlfriend says it looks like the work of a Marxist, but I don’t think that is it. Maybe it’s the struggle of emerging as a documentary photographer manifest in the day-to-day grind of a greens keeper.The tension with golfers and clubhouse management, the tight community, the exhaustion, the solitude, the stubborn determination. Or maybe it’s none of that at all.

Bio

Ryan Gauvin is a documentary photographer based in Vancouver, Canada. He holds a BA in Geography from Simon Fraser University, and an MFA in Documentary Media from Ryerson University. Ryan also attended the Eddie Adams Workshop in 2009. In the past he has partnered with the International Campaign for Tibet, and his work has been published internationally. Ryan was recently recognized at the 2009 New York Photo Awards and 2009 PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris for his work in Tibet. He is currently in the research stage of a documentary photography project on the use of depleted uranium warheads in the Balkans.

Related links

www.ryangauvin.com

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Rijasolo

Miverina, back to Madagascar

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“If you don’t know where you are going, then look at where you come from”, goes the African proverb.

“Miverina” means “to come back”. These images speak of my return to the country of my roots, Madagascar, back over on the other side of the world. It was bound to happen one day, after 20 years of absence… I was bound to feel the desire to go back one day, like an obsession to rediscover what I had forgotten, and confront my imagination with a country – a real living nation. I felt the desire to reinvent an identity after all those years of diasporic existence. These images are the result of my wanderings and meetings on “Grande Ile”. I have tried to show something of my intimate relationship with this country, the Malagasies, their daily life, and the rhythms of their existence. Yet these images also speak of distance. They show violence in my incapacity to be totally assimilated to this Ancestral Land, and violence in the idea of being a resolute foreigner in my native country. Photography is my pretext for learning again and understanding what it is to “be Malagasy”.

Bio

I’m 36 years old, and I began to photograph in 2001. In 2004 I started a personal project titled “Miverina” in which I show my intimate relationship with my country of origin, Madagascar. In 2007, I trained in photojournalism at Ecole des Métiers de l’Information (Paris) and I’m co-creator of the collective “Riva Press” with four photojournalists based in Paris. The project “Miverina” has already been exhibited (with another editing) in France and Madagascar. I live and work between France and Madagascar.

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Marco Bottelli

Angels

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The project “Angels” was born on the day i saw that dead bird.

It lay in the middle of the street, its wings stuck to the ground, white feathers covering what remained of its body. From a distance it almost looked like an angel.

“Angels” is a non-rational search for angels in our daily life. It has nothing to do with religion, but rather with my inner necessity to find something undefined, something spiritual, as shown through impulses of light on places and bodies which lost their original shape, and became a bridge between what we can touch and see and what we might feel.

This project has been realized between 2005 and 2008 in several places, mainly using a Holga and other old cameras, not in perfect working order, thereby reducing my control and letting the situation play an important part in creating the image. I would like the people who see this work to try to “feel” it. Up to now the project has never been published.

Bio

I studied photography at the “Instituto Italiano di Fotografia” in Milan, Italy. I completed my education as an assistant in an advertising photography studio. Since 2003, I have worked in the Balkans, Africa, South America and Pakistan with the support of NGOs who run projects in these areas.

Related links

www.marcobottelli.com