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Chris Bickford

Scenes from a Venetian Carnival

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This week the world’s most ancient and wide-ranging bacchanal kicks into high gear, as millions of revelers across the globe celebrate the ancient rite of Carnival.

From Bulgaria to Brazil, from Haiti to India, from Colorado to Trinidad, from Alabama to Australia; in a thousand cities, towns, and villages on six continents, everyday people will don outrageous disguises and step out into a world of of mutually suspended reality.

They will set aside their workaday personas to strut their stuff in a mind-boggling array of parades, masquerade balls, and street parties. Swept up into an annual celebration of collective mayhem, the participants of Carnival will lose themselves in a world of fantasy and revelry.

Office clerks will become Roman gods. Secretaries from the suburbs will become Amazon queens. CEO’s from uptown will don Harlequin suits and play the Fool. Construction workers from the backstreets will transform into fantastical  gangs of Mardi Gras Indians. These dramatis personae and many more will participate in a ritual that has been celebrated every year for over a thousand years, and whose roots reach back deep into the mists of human prehistory. 

Call it the anti-Christmas if you will, for Carnival celebrates the devil in us all. It upends all traditional roles and realities, and allows our pent-up dreams and fantasies to breathe the sweet air of carnal existence for a brief period of time.

From a psychological point of view, Carnival is often described as a period of sanctioned insanity, when unconscious archetypes and alter-egos are summoned from the dark corners of our souls and given a license to roam free. From an anthropological view, such rites are practiced in a vast diversity of cultures all around the world: fixed expanses of time wherein traditional hierarchies, taboos, and conventions are upended, and the Fool in all of us is permitted a day in the sun.

Or so it should be, in an ideal world. In reality, the spirit of Carnival is often hijacked and controlled by corporate sponsors, private event coordinators, profiteers, and civic restrictions. In its most famous locations, Carnival is big business, and millions of dollars are exchanged for thousands of metric tons of beads, feathers, sequins, and plastic masks. Parade routes are controlled, barriers are erected, police officers enforce order, and street hawkers do brisk business in cheap China-made costumerie. 

It is the same story the world around: as deep as the urge is to unchain Dionysus and let him dance his wild dance in a mosh-pit of collective ecstasy, even stronger is the heirophantic directive to contain, to control, and to profit from the dark strange energy that he represents. Witness the corporate takeover of rock and roll. The sexualization of advertising. The backfire and bootlegging of Prohibition.  We wage constant battle in society between order and chaos; and the pendulum swings back and forth, back and forth, in perpetual motion, in perpetuity.

Carnival as we know it was unofficially adopted by the Catholic Church in the Late Middle Ages, as part of Christianity’s endless campaign to absorb, transform, and co-opt the pagan religious practices of the conquered and converted. In its earliest years, Carnival was actually celebrated inside churches and cathedrals; bishops would dress as women, paupers would be crowned Pope, all of the ecclesiastical establishment would be mocked and lampooned, and unspeakable acts of lechery and debauchery would be committed in plain view of all. Even as holy a temple as Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris was, during the weeks of Carnival, turned into a den of iniquity.

As the centuries wore on, Carnival evolved into a more secular and civic celebration, and each town and country developed its own traditions and rituals. As European explorers sailed the seas and conquered far-off lands, the rite took root on many a foreign soil, where it grafted itself upon indigenous and imported cultural practices to produce ever-more diverse incarnations and permutations. 

As Carnival settled into a rut of quaint traditions in Europe, it flourished in North America, South America, and the Caribbean, drawing on the irresistible power of African and Amerindian spiritual practices. Carnival was King in Louisiana, Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad, Brazil. In the Old Country, Dionysus began to hide himself away from the sweeping fascism of the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Inquisition, and the rise of nation-states.

But one city in Europe continued to celebrate Carnival with ever-more elaborate and decadent enthusiasm: the floating Republic of Venice, gateway to the East, queen of the Adriatic sea. As Venice devolved from the greatest sea-power in the Mediterranean to the most decadent pleasure-den of Europe, its Carnival grew bigger, longer, and more extravagant.  At its apex in the eighteenth century, Carnival lasted all winter long, and half the city wore masks in public at all times. Canals would be drained and turned into gardens of earthly delights, and all of Europe’s aristocracy would converge for weeks of masquerade balls, secret trysts, and public spectacles.

Eventually, however, imperialism got the best of the thousand-year Republic. In 1797, Napoleon’s army marched into Venice, looted its most precious talismans, and sold the island to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Carnival withered into nothing under the disciplinarian rule of Venice’s northern neighbor, and in time it was banned outright.

Carnival slumbered for over a century in Venice, until in 1979 an enterprising coalition of artists, students, and business owners staged a revival. The first few years saw a surge of enthusiasm and growth, as the people of Venice embraced their heritage, unearthed dusty books describing the old celebrations, and created a new Carnival: a strange combination of Italian commedia dell’arte, Roman mythology, eighteenth-century foppery, hand-made ornament, and pure fantasy. Those who played a part in the revival speak of he early days as glory days, full of unbridled creativity, a rediscovery of Venetian identity, and some truly memorable parties.

The rest of the world soon took notice, and within no time the Venetian Carnival once again became host to the European aristocracy with lavish balls in ancient palazzos. Along with them came the Eighties jet-set, as well as hordes of college partiers and make-believe enthusiasts from around the world. In the space of ten years the Mask of Carnevale went from virtual non- existence to coronation as the iconic and ubiquitous symbol of Venice.

Nowadays you can’t throw a stone in Venice without hitting a street vendor or window-shop hawking cheap plastic imports of La Maschera;  and higher-end boutique stores vie for the title of the “original” mask- makers of Venice. Tourists parade around in nylon clown suits bought earlier in the day for thirty euros; and the coordination of the festival, once run by the city, has now been farmed out to an event-planning company in Milan. Corporate control is ubiquitous: giant ads and massive video screens take over Piazza San Marco, dwarfing the human celebration below. Dionysus has, once again, been bought and subdued.

But still, underneath all the commercialism, crowding, and plastic waste, the spirit of Carnival lives on. It exists in a netherworld between the real and the unreal, and one need only cock one’s head, breathe deeply, and give in to the spirit of mischief and fantasy to find it in Venice. The kids are still holding drum circles under ancient colonnades; the city’s young beauties are still being paraded through the streets and alleys borne on pallets held up by the city’s Gondoliers; and the Angels still fly all over Piazza San Marco, communing with their human consorts over birdseed and stale pastries. Rich internationals still arrive at the water-entrances of ancient palazzos to take part in elaborately-staged balls. And somewhere in an alleyway, a young couple is exploring love, or something close to it. You can find Carnival, if you seek it. You just have to use your imagination.

This photographic series is a fantasy, created from moments of reality wherein fantasies are enacted. It is not so much a document of what Carnival is, as much as a vision of what Carnival dreams itself to be; or, perhaps, what I dream it to be. The images were constructed from a collection of three year’s worth of photographs taken in Venice during the weeks of Carnival. Each image merges a scene from Carnival with a texture from an old wall, a canal reflection, a window display, or perhaps an old church.  The visual effect is to marry the make-believe scenarios enacted by contemporary Carnivaliers with the long arm of myth, memory, and history sealed within the weather-worn stones of Venice, creating a dream-like drama that straddles the bookstore categories of historical fiction and fantasy.

In Venice, as in any ancient city, history is etched upon the walls and the walkways. Centuries of the slow creep of decay–a history of floods, storms, deep freezes and crackling summer heat–have painted abstract passion-plays upon the stone and stucco of the city’s architecture. These walls have seen the rise and fall of the Venetian Empire, the flowering and decline and rebirth of Carnival, the countless dramas of one of the world’s most unusual cities being played out on the streets, along the canals, and in the shimmering lagoon that has always been her greatest treasure. As they say, if these walls could talk, well they’d probably speak Italian…

When I first began compositing images together in this way, I had no real intention or understanding of what I was doing.  It was simply one of those ideas you get, lying in bed, waiting for Morpheus to take you across the bridge of consciousness. But as the first few images began to take shape, I sensed that I was on to something, and I have continued on, somewhat giddily, combining images and blending them in various modes and levels of opacity, just seeing what happens. Some combinations work, some don’t. Some to me seem utterly sublime, whereas others are more gateways, storytelling devices, ways of filling out the picture. You will notice that some of the images border on the abstract and surreal, whereas others merely add a painterly texture to a more or less realistic image. Towards the completion of a series for presentation, my aims have been geared mostly towards consistency, flow, and color balance, as I have worked to create a kind of a journey that has cohesion as well as variety, and which moves in and out between the sacred and the mundane, between the real and the surreal.

It is my sincere hope that you enjoy these images as a gateway into your own imagination, and that something within them stirs something within you, as I in turn have been stirred by the whole project, from its uncertain beginnings all the way up to its present incarnation. I’ve already written too much but I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention the friends I encountered who made me feel welcome in a strange city and whose generosity and connections opened doors that otherwise would have been closed to me. I also haven’t touched on the preparation, process, and logistical hurdles that go with the territory on a project like this, nor have I spun any tales of the fun and the stress and the half-lies I told and the journalistic lines I crossed to bring you this little collection of vignettes. There are a few stories on my Travelogue if you are interested, but most of them are half-told too; it seems always as soon as one conflict comes to resolution, a new progression invariably begins, the infinite playlist of a life lived in half-lives, which knows that the only way to keep traveling through the jungle is to grab the next vine as the one you are holding reaches its apex…

Anyway, enough with the metaphors and the flowery language. If you’ve read this far I thank you for your patience and participation. Perhaps it will inspire you to find Carnival in your own time, in your own place, in your own mind. Many adventures to you, and may you keep your dreams alive.

 

Bio

Chris Bickford is a freelance photographer based on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

He has worked as an assignment photographer for National Geographic Traveler, The New York Times, The Daily, Milepost Magazine, and Captain Morgan Rum, among others. His photographs have also appeared in Time, Newsweek, Outside, and Surfing magazines, as well as a number of foreign and in-flight publications.

His photographic work on the surfing culture of the Outer Banks made its debut on Burn in 2009 under the title After the Storm. His work-in-progress on death, rebirth, and ritual in New Orleans was also featured here in 2011. He has exhibited in solo and group art shows in North Carolina, Virginia, DC, Michigan, Miami, and New York City.

He is available for assignments worldwide, and also does the occasional speaking presentation at high schools and colleges. He is currently working with a number colleagues in an effort to form a new style of interactive photography workshop.

 

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Bob Black

Loomings Upon An Horizon

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Author’s Preface:

It has been more than a year and a half since I completed “Loomings Upon an Horizon” and I have not, until recently, looked at it since except to show it as part of an author’s talk and projection in January 2012.  

I have set it adrift and moved on to another and maybe fuller project. It has been a somewhat painful and embarrassing experience looking at it again: akin to recalling a former messier and awkward self. But one abides and in that humour, smiles at the ungainly self one often is.

The above story is an edited version of the final book. I should say that I’ve never been interested in individual photographs, per se, but what pictures do in combination with others, including all the repetitions and motifs you’ll find here and in the longer version, the good with the bad, the confident with the cow-licked and dog-eared.

In my own projects, I rarely experience individual photographs as “good” or “successful” but instead as notes or syllables in the story or emotion I am trying to convey. With the exception of the final tree, I’ve never really liked any of the individual photographs but am instead interested in the noise they make together, notes in a musical score or the texture of brush strokes in a painting.

The original includes drawings and a few poems as well as pictures not included in the BURN version. A longer form of the picture sequence (without the drawings or poems) can be found at the link provided below.

Much of “Loomings” is comprised of a hand-made book (tape and all) but because of the length, it seems not only self-indulgent but, remedially speaking, unfair to ask readers to wade across its full, bloated body here. In this age of already prolonged exposure to the dimming flicker of the LCD squawk, spending too much time glued to the computer screen just feels plain wrong.

Allow your eyes a well-deserved rest away from the buzz of the clicks and hisses. Have a peek and then go out into the world and drift and survey and listen. Also, as for the long author’s text below, I can’t separate the pictures from the words nor the syllables from the tri-x grain. A family. Read it or not, do with it as you will. Brevity has never been one of my graces.

 

I would like to thank the photographer/writer Ling Ang for her openness in allowing me to quote from her poem for the project. It means a great deal to me, the words and the friendship.

Most importantly, I wish to offer my deep appreciation to David Alan Harvey and the editors at BURN for their gracious patience and humour in wrangling me into shape. Lasso’d without the rope burns.

–bob

 

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“There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”—Herman Melville

 

“It passes, but it does not pass away.”–Laszlo Krasznahorkai

 

“And I

am the bodiless

The spectre

The comma nestled between the verbs”

–Ying Ang

 

I

 

Picture this: pollen of garlic light.

 

The horizon like a finger of wet chicory. The lift of language barrier’d and ballasted by the curve of the land along the sea’s long liquid neck. There, stretching go we.

 

Swift the sound of scattering wings that clip the space between a window in front  of you and the far-lost long-ago window through which you once pulley’d down the sky: a kite of birds and telephone line, eclipsing.

 

Stones gather beneath a fallow wall the way tab and tip and beer-caps drift as if dust into the knees of gutters and grassy corners. It is we not the place which is unkempt, is it not?

 

Bone and feather-less wing, knobby beak and elongated rib of our throat: all that is left of our singing when the song has gone wrong, all that is left when the singing has gone rung, wrong-by-wrong.

 

II

 

So there it is,

Life changes in the quick, a click of this and twitch of that until cut and tissued and forgotten like a careless nick. And all the spanning and the planning. Is it easier said than un-done?

 

And yet that spark, sparred in the instant, then and there, slipping forward-toward the something and then always (regardless) away.

 

The change in that unrecognizable mount the way breath fractures its step from the copper in-take of our concavity through the silent soft hum of an exhalation the way the curving land beneath our feet bumbles and joists and cantors without recognizable knowing the earth our death our thoughts the days  dotted by our forward moving and if but we are still enough at times or tumbleweed-headlong-over-heels enough in our racing that moment that cardiac infraction a blip can catch us just long enough in its stilled web for us to more than know it but to see and feel and quarter it like geometry as recipe as the sound of her voice tango’d to the shadow on the wall an intact-tact and of that we need only to touch the transformed carving moment once to know it makes up the days and ways that make up the who of the what we are sung from.

 

(breath)

 

Stick these moments together and exhale. Scatter these photographs each-from-each and turn aside. Have you caught up?

 

Sung at last and un-lunged.

 

III

 

We create that which invents us and name it home.

 

Do we not?

 

And though the world rises before us, we are its constructor. We stitch together from a tapestry of twig and feather the nest from our surroundings, kingfishers tucking at the muck and stain, the light and ligature, tucking the world into our beaks and carrying it over land and time until we’ve perched and begun to shape it into a loamy hull. These hull our refuge.  And all the small crooks and knuckled branches, the memories and experiences, the quotidian and the quixotic churned and chewed into the clay that will shape the world we call home. Along with the detritus and deposits, an accumulated crew of observations gathered and held before us until it remains fast, the outline and scaffolding of “you.” The joinery a loom of trickled time shuttled back and fourth into an assembled shape, the finery a tapestry of earthy materials become a frock that we wear the days of our lives. We call this garment a village, city, nation, home, the turf from which we believe an understanding can emerge, our identity, our malleable, squeaky self. But we are more. We are inventors. Look around. Look around.

 

What then is this task, the task that we have each set for ourselves in our waking, that which has been described and spoken of as “identifying” and as “seeing”? The hum inside the organ of our being. And what is this thing called place and what is that which we imagine as knowing? Is it not a conjuring, an awakening to the alchemy of our own creation? How is it that we begin to make sense of our whereabouts, how to carve out a home, a patch of time and swatch of hobbled earth into which we can locate ourselves:  between the pitch and pull of the earth? And how does one begin to carve, from the ripened world, a small pocket of safety and calm that defines the place from which you have come and into which you return when left mossy and shorn?

 

How does one begin to know of which and of what they are.

 

IV

 

“Loomings Upon an Horizon” is long and it is conflicted.

 

Just as I am, conflicted. It has been more than a year since I completed ‘Loomings’ and I am a very different person now than I was when I had first set out to navigate some dreamed-up voyage that I had once hoped would set me free of the intense inwardness and abstraction of most of my work, set me free of the joinery of all those faces and voices I was compelled to ruminate upon and ruin with my unseeing and unsaying camera. I had wanted, in a word, to escape. To escape my own work and my self and the deluded self and thinking that I seemed reluctant to shear away. To escape not my life, mind you, nor my family (at the time the anchor holding firm the meaning and manner of my life), but the alphabet of what I had always photographed: people’s faces, people’s eyes, specific places in such a cloistered and claustrophobic manner that the work rarely seemed capable to speak of anything but only of ‘me.’ All those faces were my face, my blindness and my struggle. Take to the land and to the sea.

 

It has been difficult to shape ‘Loomings” into something seemingly coherent or cohesive for it has  for the length of much of its creation meant more to me as a private rumination on the importance and solace of trees and land, meant more to me as a kind of self-examination (or rejection) of the kind of pictures I had already made, as a kind of catharsis or tackling than  as an actualized photographic story. In fact, even now, especially now as I look at it again more than a year after I had even last looked at the pictures, the sequence, I see only its failures and sloppiness. I had always viewed the pictures more as drawings, sketches that allowed me to continue with two larger bodies of work with which I had been obsessed than as something brought to fruition. I say this not out of false humility but because it’s the way I feel about it. To photograph land without a metaphysic but with a desire to break my own photographic tics against the size and strength of the land and the sea.

 

What began as a kind of sketchbook, a cahier of sorts, to balance or blanche the two longer projects, “Loomings” turned into a way to escape all those intense faces and rhymed-racking that I was struggling with, including my own face, my own blindness and my own disappointments. Its gestation first began several years ago when working on a small body of work, private reflections on the great writer Antonio Lobo Antunes and Portugal, and now ends with that first photograph. A tree at night and its timbre in the wind.

 

V

 

In this work,  I had hoped to describe just one simple thing: the small and intensive pockets of silence, the knocking of the wind’s cantor through a canopy of trees, the spray of the sea’s tumble, the notched scouring of the sky as the memory of my father’s face when he carried me as a child, the scent of green mountains verdant and tinctured by sea oil in Taiwan,  the curve of a hill penumbra’d by the sun, land and sea as a hermitage that tented the under-top and undertow of my life. I wished to make a series of photographs not about what the land looked like but what its power and nourishing and silence felt like. The size of its certainty large and small. I realized that pictures could not accomplish what I had felt by doing simply, nothing.

 

VI

 

More than two years ago, I had promised Magnum photographer and BURN Curator/Publisher David Alan Harvey that I wanted to make an exclusive project for BURN Magazine. At the time, I thought it would be much more interesting for photographer, a photographer, to try to make something with the magazine itself in mind. Well, for good or ill, this is that promise. In the subsequent year after suggesting it to them, “Loomings” underwent many changes and variations, in both concept and picture. What I had hoped at first to be made up solely of pictures without any people or reference to people, I quickly realized seemed frustratingly impersonal. As in life, I tend to wear my emotions on my photographic sleeves and instead grew to need to photograph not the relic of the land but what it felt like to struggle and to find succor and awe in both the land and the people in my life who shared those places in my life.  No matter how we sheer and shore, no matter how we reconfigure the land and our lives to our own hungry need, the land observes and absorbs us and does not let go even in our forgetting. To work images from small abstract gestures, the stroke of black ink upon rice  paper as a means to sing out the world, to write the letters of the lives around in small, cow-licked strokes.

 

In truth, “Loomings” is a kind of calligraphy. In fact, more than photography, it was inspired more by painting and drawing (ink and charcoal) than by the tradition of photography. At its heart, within my own heart, is the compass of Chinese scroll paintings and calligraphy. My childhood among the wind-fed verdant cities and hills of Taiwan or at least the place that sits inside the hermitage of my memories.

 

Strokes of words comprised of the shift of shade and vocabulary of light.

 

And seemingly with less and less time, I snug up longer and longer against the tree of doing little more than thinking or reading or just listening. Eyes open and drawn to that which scatters through me. This too, the doing of nothing but sitting, sometimes feels like a failure. Though it is to that failure that I am increasingly drawn. The heat-tug of time played out along our making of things and digesting of them. For in the end, “Loomings” really isn’t about anything. I have no grand design nor want to convey any large or significant meaning. If anything, I hope that it conveys my deep love of the earth around especially how light and shadow work their dance in the magic of the land. If anything, I hope that it conveys my deep love for photography and its remarkable and endless flexibility; its extraordinary generosity in allowing for us to seize and stretch it into whatever tale or notion we wish to tell. Although much of it is visually dark, I hope that others see this not as some kind of angst-ringing suffocation but rather about trying to confine my own photographic practice to some basic tools: a brush and ink with black and white, not for nostalgia or romance but for dietary reasons. What is the color of a letter? Letters, though seen in black most often, convey the color of surfacing around and do not need a wide palette to suggest the multifarious forms that abound. Light in the suggestion, color in the scarping hill beneath the palm of sky and cloud. The alchemy of this waking world.

 

Toward that finger-stain’d horizon each of us go, sprocket-after-sprocket, click by click, f-stop breath, as all things tumble into and at a time.

 

VII

 

An approximation of love even when in error.

 

And too many words and too many pictures and too little time.  Alas.

 

But even in the error, from the error really, comes a love more precise than its original approximation and that all I have learned from the leaving and the losing of things points toward something simple. Not photographs but the living underneath and entwined and enmeshed in the world makes for the singing, makes of the singing out to it, if even with these bewildering and imperfect gestures, essential for in that clinking and clanking I’ve learned to recognize the timbre and the clamor of my heart lit sloppy but undeniably a mess, but childishly hungry and bedazzled by unrest and ignition of our gravitational life.

 

Nothing more deep or artistic than that.

 

So be it.

 

VIII

 

All that surfeit of light and surrounding life giving and graving and snapping above and through the geography of life and its sound, inimical.

 

Though all things may vanish, they do not pass away.

 

–bob black

 

Author’s note:

 

I want to thank David Alan Harvey for his inimical generosity and patience for who but he and where but BURN could a photographer publish such a broken and long-winded series of pictures. Who but David would allow such looseness and such an ungainly and addled series. Too many pictures, too many words. For him and his sustaining belief, I am always grateful and filled by love. It goes without saying that the above text does not have to be read. It isn’t an explanation but instead a kind of sibling, the whiskey in the beer. Take it for what you wish.

 

And so, this series is dedicated to my father Robert A. Black, who taught me about the sea, my mother Margo Woodward, who taught me about the sway of a garden and to my dear friend Marc Davidson who taught about endurance and acceptance: with light upon the horizon and reckoning.

 

Bio

Bob is a writer and photographer currently based in Toronto.  He has exhibited and published his writing and photographic work in a variety of publications and venues (yada yada yada) though he’s a bit fatigued by the taxonomy of all of that now. Instead, he is more interested in a good bottle of wine and  long chat or slow walk than where those pictures and words have and will end up. Truthfully, he wishes he were handier around the house and still aspires to win a Father-of-the-Year award more than anything photographic or literary.  He is currently trying to finish a Children’s Book for his son and is at work on a project that will contain a ridiculous number of pictures he’s too embarrassed to even mention. But that’s another story. Most importantly, his home is always open to wayward and neighborhood cats. Just paw at the door and come in.

 

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Arif Iqball

Glimpses of the Floating World

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Outside Japan there is often a misunderstanding about the role of the Geisha and that misunderstanding comes from different literary and movie interpretations/fictionalization by non-Japanese at different points in history. The difficulty also comes from the inability to recognize/accept that female entertainers can exist in cultures without engaging in any form of sexual entertainment.

The historical city of Kyoto, Japan is the true center of this floating world and home to five Kagai (literally flower towns, but specifically, performance districts) where you can see Geishas today. The oldest Kagai dates back to the fifteenth century and the tradition of the Geisha continues in Kyoto in the true manner and spirit as it has historically, where the women take pride in being “women of the mind” versus “women of the body”. By all local/Japanese definitions, these women are living art as well as the pinnacle of Japanese eloquence, good manners, style and elegance and are highly respected in Japanese society as artists. Some of their teachers have been labeled as “Living National Treasures” by the Japanese Government. The “Gei” of the Geisha itself means Art and “sha” means a person. Historically both men and women have been labeled Geisha although that word is seldom used and Geiko and Maiko (Apprentice Geiko) are the more appropriate forms of address.

There has been very little work done to photograph the artistic side of the Geiko and Maiko and my work is an effort to see them as living art and to be able to portray them in both formal and informal settings. Behind the painted face is really a teenager/young woman working very hard through song, dance, music, and witty conversation to make the customers of the tea houses escape from their world of stress to a world of art/humour/relaxation and laughter.

Most of this work was done in Medium Format to enable the viewer to eventually see and feel the larger photograph itself as art and I hope that this broader work can shed a new light to the understanding of the Maiko and Geiko and bring respect to them as artists from the non-Japanese viewer.

 

Bio

Arif Iqball was born in Pakistan in 1964 and has spent a third of his life each in Pakistan, US, and Japan respectively.  His curiosity about the balance between modernity and tradition originally attracted him to Japan and in the process, he completed a Masters Degree in Japanese Studies with an interest in Japanese Literature and the visual aesthetic of old Japanese movies.

An avid travel photographer, he uses a nostalgic lens to find beauty in ordinary life and people and is attracted to traditions and artists who are fading away in this modern world.  When completed, this interim work on the Geiko and Maiko in Kyoto will be presented both as a book, and as an exhibit.

His Japan related photographs have appeared in the Washington Post, Lonely Planet, and in Children books.

He currently lives and works in Tokyo.

 

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Filippo Mutani

The Backstage Diaries

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Originally being a reportage photographer, I landed into fashion quite randomly, being assigned by an Italian magazine to follow Karl Lagerfeld in his 2009 Venice Chanel Cruise fashion show.

I was immediately more attracted in the before and after, in the work and humanity behind the fashion shows, than in the shows themselves. Assignement after assignement, fashion week after fashion week, “The Backstage Diaries” is now quite a body of work, collecting 3 years of fashion backstage shootings, mainly between Milan and New York City.

“The Backstage Diaries” have been widely published (A magazine, Vogue.it, Vanity Fair, Elle France, by the others) and have been awarded with international photographic prizes such as IPA, NPPA, and WPGA.

I hope that “The Backstage Diaries” will become my first photographic book in a very near future.

 

Bio

Filippo Mutani is based in Milan, he teaches reportage and communication at IED Institute and at Il Sole 24 Ore Master School.

He is a worldwide contributor for Getty Images, represented for licensing by Art+Commerce.

His work appears in T-The New York Times, Financial Times, Newsweek, The Guardian, Internazionale, Touring/National Geographic, Elle, Grazia, Cosmopolitan, Vogue Italia, Vanity Fair, IL, Max, A magazine.

 

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