Monthly Archive for January, 2018

Jordan Gale

It Is What It Is

[ EPF 2017 – YOUNG TALENT AWARD / FUJIFILM FINALIST ]

I was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; the only child to a single mother who since before I was born has struggled with a combination of drug abuse and poverty. When I was nine, our house was raided by the police on the suspicion that drugs were sold there. After this incident, we were forced to move and my mother attempted to overcome her addiction to methamphetamine. For several months, she slept most of the day, forcing me to partially raise myself. I always assured my mother that her addiction was never a source of shame or resentment, but this promise became more and more a lie as time went on.

My mother never quit, and in high school I acquired my own dependencies to drugs as means to escape. In retrospect, I now accept that I was angry, and wanted to be anywhere besides in my own reality. I resented my mother’s addiction and my own place in the world.

“It Is What It Is” acts as a form of therapy. An autobiographical visual diary where I confront the people and decisions of my past. I embrace the fact that my decisions were necessary in order to gain hindsight. Stagnancy and fear create a mold and some friends and family close to my heart blissfully lay in this mold forever. I was lucky; for many this cycle is never broken. By photographing the people and scenes most familiar to me I can begin to accept that these scenes are an aspect of the world. These photographs for me often stir up more questions than they provide answers for. One fact I’ve learned that I hold close is that, I’m in no way content at the moment. But, I am proud of where I’ve come from.

Short Bio

I was born and raised in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and fell in love with the art of photography in a high school darkroom class when I was sixteen. After high school I went on to receive my Associates of Arts degree from Kirkwood Community College, and am now an undergraduate student at The University of Iowa. Since arriving at The University of Iowa I have studied under photographers such as Danny Wilcox Frazier, and Jeff Rich. I aim to create intimate personal projects documenting the lives of those closest to myself still living in Cedar Rapids and neighboring communities. Photographs from my various projects have been featured in Lenscratch, Photographer?s Forum, and have been awarded by The Iowa Press Association, and The Associated Collegiate Press.

Related Links

jordangalephotos.com

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The Emerging Photographer Fund is supported by generous donors to the Magnum Foundation

Manon Lanjouère

Bleu Glacé

[ EPF 2017 – YOUNG TALENT AWARD / FUJIFILM FINALIST ]

Bleu Glacé is a cabinet of curiosity, a “scientist” study synthetically rebuilding the Icelandic landscape. The use of synthetic material is to question our daily use of plastics, resins and polymers in an exponential way, and how it can change the geological landscape of the surrounding world in a long term. If Iceland magnetizes our attention, it is essentially because of its geology.

“Those landscapes are a wonderful geological lesson, the La Redoute catalog of the volcanic and ice form,” wrote Michel Tournier in his novel, Les Météores.

© Manon Lanjouère

Bleu Glacé is this catalog of landscapes that everybody imagines to meet in Iceland, a catalog for an immobile traveller, a lounge traveller.

The imagination makes the object we’re thinking about and desiring appears before our very eyes in order to take possession of it.

The resulting image is an interiority synthesis, rebuild in studio. The object is absent but all of its qualities are in front of us, the impression is here, as well as the characters certainly looking like human beings but who definitively are characters without any intentionality.

In those objects that I produce, everybody is free to see a waterfall, an iceberg, a plastic bag or polystyrene. The imitation is only partial, as only few components are replicated. However those components are sufficient to give the form a representative value. The concept is then appearing.

The images created this way summon and question the “primary ardour of water, wind, clouds, and sheer colours projected on the sky and the horizons” that Samivel describes in his book L’Or de l’Islande.

Bleu Glacé has for ambition to represent this mystical elsewhere, land still unknown.

Short Bio

Manon was born in 1993. She lives and works in Paris. After receiving an undergraduate in Art History at the Sorbonne University in Paris, she decided to dedicate herself fully into photography and joined Gobelins School of Image in 2014 from which she graduated top of her class in 2017. Through a parallele evolution among a theater in Paris, her practice of photography is characterised by directing and settings. Her work influenced by litterature is focusing to depict fictional worlds. Worlds in which she tries to understand the interraction between the landscape ant the human.

Her work bleu Glacé has been exhibited in 2017 in several festivals in France (Itinéraire des photographes voyageurs in Bordeaux, Festival la Gacilly in la Gacilly, les Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, Nuits photographiques de Pierrevert in Pierrevert, les Rencontres photographiques du 10eme in Paris) and was a finalist of the Price QPN (Nantes, France) and a finalist of the Bourse du Talent Studio.

Related Links

manonlanjouere.com

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The Emerging Photographer Fund is supported by generous donors to the Magnum Foundation

Joel Karppanen

Finnish Pastoral

[ EPF 2017 – YOUNG TALENT AWARD / FUJIFILM FINALIST ]

Georg Simmel wrote about the relieving power of the ruins. According to him the ruins help us to appreciate everything “incomplete, shapeless and what shatter the frames”.

Finnish Pastoral is a photo series that offers its viewers new means to indeed shatter the set up models we have for perceiving our surroundings. It is a story of the village of Karinkanta, in the region of Northern Ostrobothnia, with a population of just under 200 people: a ruin yet to come. It gives an honest look beyond romantic nationalism, into Finnish countryside and the changes it is facing in the 2010’s postindustrial era when not only the reformation of livelihood, urban-rural fusion and migration, but also disparity, externality and echo chambers keep the countryside in a constant tension.

Almost every Finn, including me, has their roots on the countryside so we tend to have a pretty black and white mental image on reality. I have followed the daily life in the village for over two years in order to redefine my relationship with countryside. Therefore the series is also a study about the modern humans yearn for the rural life.

In Karinkanta nothing but everything happens and my democratic camera captures that all timeless stagnation. The in-depth personal series consist of understated portraits, landscapes, frozen moments and details made on medium format camera.

Without any nostalgia Finnish Pastoral paints a portrait of the bygone Finnish Dream.

Short Bio

Joel Karppanen (b. 1993) is a self-taught Finnish artist whose photographs and videos, conversing on topics around human environment, common people and the urban-rural dichotomy, stem from the tradition of social realism. He is strongly influenced by literature and cinema. When working, he strives to find magic in moments most would describe as ordinary. In 2017 Karppanen received Young Hero / Jouko Lehtola Foundation Award for a Young Documentary Photographer. His works can be found in various public and private collections. Karppanen lives and works in Northern Finland.

Related Links

joelkarupanen.com

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The Emerging Photographer Fund is supported by generous donors to the Magnum Foundation

Neha Hirve

Full Shade / Half Sun

[ EPF 2017 – FUJIFILM / YOUNG TALENT AWARD RUNNER UP ]

Tamil Nadu, India. This land was a desert, once upon a time. The soil dried up and the water ran off until nothing would grow because the people had cut the trees to build their cities. Men and women journeyed here from the ends of the earth, people for whom ordinary life wasn’t enough anymore, and they planted acacia trees to shelter them from the burning sun, and built their lives together and found meaning in the world once again. The acacia covered half the soil from the sun and the thorniest plants began to grow in their shade.

© Neha Hirve

Digging holes to plant new saplings. Since 2003, volunteers members of the Sadhana community have been working to re-plant the area’s indigenous Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest.

Jamie collects food for the pet cows, not used by the community for any animal product, not even their manure.

Remnants of an eco-hut built from packs of mud.

Now, the jungle is a womb. The air in the tropics is like warm honey, viscous, sticky, filling the ears until the sounds of the outside world are far away. In the still light of the afternoons, hours pass like days and the trees stand sentinel.
Because every year, the summer comes, and with it, the distant memory of when there was nothing.

Peackocks.

Maxime and Thaïs prepare to use the neurotoxin cypermethrin to combat termite hills. It’s one of the few things that is too difficult to do with natural methods.

Old school bus.

Gome is one of four Israeli sisters, none of whom currently goes to a formal school. This practice is known as ‘unschooling’ and is one of the core values of the Sadhana community.

Blending the genres of documentary, the archive, and fine art, Full Shade / Half Sun is not so interested in journalistic fact, but attempts to bring up philosophical and existential questions of the ways in which we find meaning in the land we live on.

Members of the Sadhana community swim almost daily in a large pool of mud, to cool off or just for entertainment.

Naëlann with a snake skin. He has never been to a formal school, a practice called ‘unschooling’ – © Neha Hirve

Lise at sunset.

Mosquito net in the forest.

Short Bio

I am a long-term project photographer based in Stockholm, and interested in man’s relation to the natural environment, and the photographic archive. With a degree in filmmaking, the cinematic and the performative influence my photographic work. Recently I was the recipient of the Women Photograph Grant, have work in publications such as Tidningen ETC and National Geographic, and have participated in exhibitions in Sweden and New York.

Related Links

nehahirve.com

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The Emerging Photographer Fund is supported by generous donors to the Magnum Foundation