STORIES OF ISOLATION

Todd Hido has taken the American road and its landscapes, its stories of isolation and carefully made them conform to his will. The book, beautiful and large feels natural as if these physical places and these moments in time exist to fulfill the urges within Hido, to express his "need" and his "feeling". In the textures, both grotesque and beautiful... in the obscured vision, in the ice, in the lunar like emptiness, in the rain and in the sleet... the aesthetics act as metaphor and story for emptiness itself, for sorrow, for separation... for isolation.

book: A Road Divided, Todd Hido (2010)

INNER HUMANITY

Wolf Suschitzky, the Viennese born photographer and cinematographer who has live in London since 1935, talked about his life and work in a public interview with Norman Lebrecht, the BBC Radio 3 presenter and award-winning writer, at the Lebrecht annual garden party on 18th September. It was a great privilege to listen to a photographer whose work has been illuminated by his inner humanity and his engagement with the world around him. His work always tells a story and it creates a lot of questions. The questions will never be answered, and that is the part of the pleasure of looking at the results of his beautifully crafted photographs.

http://www.wolfsuschitzkyphotos.com/

DUST

Olivier Valsecchi, 1979, France, is specialized in portraiture and photographing nudes, but the most attention he has recently gotten is with his series Dust. Nude males and females covered in white powder in awkward positions. This most recent work, “Dust,” features men and women seemingly caught in a womb-like dust storm, an alternate universe devoid of gravity and color. “The Dust series is an in-between,” explains the artist. “Between death and birth, in a chronological sense. It is the ‘re’. It is the chaos, the confusion between the water and the gloom that is the cradle of the world. Between the fall and the takeoff, the renunciation and the impulse, the bodies are chalky, zombie-like, between animated and disembodied. The in-between, meaning what is nearly, what is not quite.”

magazine: Eyemazing 2010

MOODY ATMOSPHERES

 

What can I say about Hollie Fernando's work. It's a tough one, the girl is a genius and her work carries a real charm to it. Her photo style is largely influenced by the teenage years, love and fashion. Creating the carefree atmospheres in her work is something she can easily achieve as she is lucky to be submerged with beautiful people around her. The mood within her photographs tend to reflect the mood she's in when she took the picture or when it was in process.

http://www.mintmagazine.co.uk/art/hollie-fernando/

HUMANISTIC EYE

Tomasz is a Polish photography currently specialising in documentary essay work. Among his interests are humanistic photography and the classic form of the black and white photo-essay. He began with nature photography and then turned to social documentary. In the past few years he has concentrated on photographing sports, but bringing to the area the kind of humanistic eye of a great photojournalist.

book: World Press Photo 2008

CONTRASTO

Lorenzo Cicconi Massi (41), Italy, graduated in sociology and then started working with black-and-white photography with a high contrast in it. At the same time he made his first low-budget short films, which received awards at a number of festivals and were broadcast by Tele+ and Rai television stations. In the 1990s he began once again to concentrate on telling stories through still photography, his series on children's games being awarded the Canon prize.

 

http://www.lorenzocicconimassi.it/

HUMBLE LIGHT

Yousuf Karsh (December 23, 1908 – July 13, 2002 was born in Madin, Armenia and became one of the world’s most renowned portrait photographers. Karsh was a master in the use of studio lights. One aspect of Karsh's portrait is the emphasis on the lighting the subject's hands separately. He photographed many of the great and celebrated personalities of his generation. Karsh said "My chief joy is to photograph the great in heart, in mind, and in spirit, whether they be famous or humble."

documentary: Het uur van de wolf, 9 juli 2010

SUGGESTIVE PHENOMENA

The large cibachrome photographs in Juul Hondius ’ show "Faction" were all suggestive of phenomena like illegal immigration, asylum seekers, refugees and civil war. In an age in which winning entries for the World Press Photo competition usually are highly aesthetic and carefully composed, no matter how gruesome the subject-matter, Hondius' glossy depictions of politically charged scenes cause a flash of recognition.

magazine: FOAM, nr. 18

PROVOCATIVE CHARISMA

Reka Koti, a young Hungarian talent. This is some of her newest work, which was done in collaboration with Nori Sarma, who Reka found out about after reading about her in the Young Hungarian Talent column. Their goal was to make a provocative, and honest series of photographs that used charismatic personalities instead of professional models that reveals the face of modern Budapest through their eyes.

http://www.myspace.com/kotirekaagnes/photos/11681505#{%22ImageId%22%3A11680929}

WORLD IMPRESS

Tommaso Ausili was born in Rome in 1970. He came to photography at the age of 30, after a degree in law. At the beginning Ausili was interested in travel and geographical photography, the he gradually approached photo-reportage, fascinated by the expressive means and the interpretative possibilities peculiar to this kind of photography. In 2009 he started his “Hidden Death” project, focused on the death of animals for slaughter, awarded at the World Press Photo 2010 (3rd prize, Contemporary Issues Stories) where I noticed him last summer at the exhibition in the Janskerk in Utrecht. 

exhibition: World Press Photo 2010

SEXUAL INTRIGUE

Ellen von Unwerth was a supermodel before the term was invented, so she knows a thing or two about photographing beautiful women. Switching effortlessly between color and immaculate black and white, von Unwerth‘s photography revels in sexual intrigue, femininity, romance, fetishism, kitsch humor, decadence and sheer joie de vivre. Whether nude or in lingerie and a dazzling smile, her subjects are never objectified. Some flaunt personal fantasies; others are guarded, suggesting that we have stumbled into a secret world. Fashion and fantasy were never so enchantingly combined. 

book: Fraulein, Ellen von Unwerth (Taschen)

HUMAN MADE LANDSCAPE

Prolific photographer and Panopticon Gallery artist Keith Johnson encourages all photographic medias to be used in installations, books, topologies, or extended images. He started making simple yet complicated photos as he travelled the US by car, working as a camera salesman. He continues to find human-made landscapes that are often rather horrifying when you stop to look at all the man-made trash in front of the lens.

http://www.keithjohnsonphotographs.com/