Tilyen Mucik

HERBARIUM | When I think of my childhood I remember that when I was alone I saw the world different. I enjoyed walking to school, observing houses and thinking about other people lives, looking for figure shapes in rocks, stopping around gardens and counting flowers, thinking of how long the snail trails on the sidewalk are.

Fiona Filipidis

Will revery alone really do if bees are few? As much as I love to daydream, I’m afraid the answer is a resounding, gut-wrenching ‘NO’. Bees are crucial to the continuation of human life. But our impact on the environment through the misuse of insecticides, added to the proliferation of pests and diseases and loss of habitat, is threatening the survival of this mighty insect. When bees have access to good nutrition, so do we – you can thank them for one in three bites of food you eat – and yet every batch of pollen has at least six pesticides in it.

Giorgio Bagnarelli

Borca di Cadore is a small town in the province of Belluno, in the region called Cadore, in the north-east of Italy. The village is located in the middle of the Boite river valley, at 942mt above sea level close to the Dolomites and just below Mount Antelao, along the road that leads to the famous village of Cortina d'Ampezzo, then continuing towards Germany.

Corey J. Isenor

Breaking Tradition is a series of medium format film photographs spanning a period of 5 years during the time I lived in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, Canada. These images attempt to explore a sincere appreciation of the landscape while taking into consideration what is expected and maintained aesthetically within a tourism-focused seaside environment.

Vasiliki Stamou

LIFE IS LIKE A CIRCUS. THE MAGIC OF JOY AND DREAMS. A RAINBOW OF CONTRAST. THE EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS. THE LIGHTS ON. BEHIND THE SCENES. HUMANS ARE THE ONLY BEGINNING AND END.

In this project my purpose is to approach the people who live and work in the circus. I had always wondered what their lives were like and it all seemed surreal in my eyes. I was fascinated by their "nomadic" lifestyle, their constant moving from city to city and their everyday life. What kind of people are they really? It overwhelms me! They indeed have special abilities, but only on the stage. Their lives are no different from ours, their microcosm reflects real life. When they step on stage they leave their problems and identity aside. All they want is to make people believe that the magic of the circus is real. As Oscar Wilde put it, "A man is less himself when he speaks as himself. Give him a mask and he’ll tell you the truth." Without their audience these people are nothing and without them we can’t dream.

Jeff Kauffman

The Carface project is a series of photographs of the "faces" of toy Matchbox® cars from the mid-1960s to early 1970s. The artist chose a head-on view of the toys to portray the strongest, most unique part of any subject, the face. The use of square composition, shallow focus and a rich black background together emphasize the power of this portrayal. As old as the artist himself, the toys bear the scratches, chips, and accumulated imperfections from life's wear and tear.

 

The artist adds, "Until the early 1970s, Janet worked most of her adult life at a corner store in a rural Pennsylvania town. As each new toy reached the store, Janet purchased it for her growing collection. "They might be worth something someday", we would hear her say. When I grew up and moved away, she proudly gave me the collection, coupled with a wood display case hand-crafted by her husband George. Janet (1917-) and George (1915-2016) are my grandparents."

Justin Keene

Justin is an unrecognised documentary portrait photographer focusing on some of the social issues in South Africa. He is self-taught and works using only film on a medium-format Bronica camera. Whilst his work looks across the spectrum of Africa's complex societies, his recent work focuses on some of the individuals involved with the fight against illegal wildlife syndicates in Southern Africa. The issue is complex and spans a global reach, however, Justin looks to highlight the positive effects that rural responses to the problem are having in parts of South Africa and what it means for communities. Justin tries to capture the truth in the world through the photograph. Using little post-shot retouching he rather focuses on the moment and the best way of presenting sentiment of the featured people and their social context to the viewer. Importantly, in addition to his unique aesthetic and subject matter, his photographs attempt to commentate on the broader social themes South Africa has battled with historically and the issues the country faces in the future. His work uses social academic studies and his plans for the future will further explore the enhanced social and economic effects that all women anti-poaching units can have in areas affected by poaching and with low employment opportunities.

With the Northern White Rhinos reproductive abilities recently dying out, international attention refocuses on the remaining Southern White Rhino and Black Rhino species and their protection in Africa. This series, People Against Poaching, shows some of the people fighting against illegal wildlife syndicates in the Northeast of South Africa. People living and working within the reserves are constant targets for poachers looking to extract inside information of the rhinos’ locations - the photographs present people’s strength in their fight against the poachers. The people in plain clothes are mostly children representing South Africa’s resistance in younger generations preserving morality and fighting against illegal wildlife trafficking. The men in uniform work for a reserve and are dedicated to this important issue on a daily basis; they have undergone lie detecting tests to verify their allegiances. The problem of poaching is driven internationally and the market is complex, touching on many historical issues in Africa relating to land and resource acquisition. Poaching offers quick money in a society that does not offer much economic opportunity – these people are moral representatives of an ethically troubled nation.

Kaitlin Botts

Exquisite Proof aestheticizes and records the moment of metamorphosis. The pinprick of the subject forcing itself through into another plane, the fissure occurring before our eyes: the before, the after, the act that unites the two states of existence together within the same visual space. Within the series Exquisite Proof, the ephemeral is being utilized as a means to document and preserve a moment of transformation, to understand it more fully, to aestheticize a moment that oftentimes occurs without our knowing or understanding that it has even occurred. We rarely engaged with metamorphosis so abruptly or so distinctly, for humans it is a gradual change, a series of events which alter us, which impose that transformation. This series condenses this progression into a singular image in order to depict that which occurred, that which is occurring, and that which will occur. Exquisite Proof is the fissure, the puncture, the wound that opens up another existence.

Marco Marzocchi

Oyster | Made over the course of 10 years, Oyster is a visual diary compiled by Marzocchi as a ways to uncover clues in understanding his absent parents. At times boardering on frustration and violence his images express his search for a 'culprit', a cause for his disfunctional childhood environment. Using archival and original imagery, the artist ransacks the past to build a present in a process of forgiving and letting go, as a search to find love and healing. 

Odette England

This series is about land, gender, and the adaptation of vernacular photographs. I grew up in a male dominated farming environment. Labelled a “tomboy” for being gender rebellious – a word I now understand is problematic and carries baggage about gender behavior, sexuality, and what it means to be a girl – my sense of self was shaped by how I was taught to cooperate with the land. Be practical, logical, down-to-earth. Historically, men were the predominant explorers of land, on foot and visually. In this series, I ask: can landscapes, majestic or ordinary, be gendered? To what extent can I re-shape representations of land as opposed to them shaping me? I hand-cut and collage vernacular photographs of land taken by men to present these questions. I rework and thus begin to reclaim the male gaze on the land. I turn landscapes into semi-figurative studies.

Lara Orawski

This series looks at the drying landscape of the Salton Sea and brief encounters with its surrounding area. Initially an accident, the Salton Sea became an ecological experiment that is now a disappearing artifact of American resort culture. Sometimes the places we go become a direct reflection of where we've come from. 

Katie Sadie

A selection of photographs taken on my travels from Toronto, Ontario, Canada to Los Angeles, California, U.S.A in November of 2015 - April 2016. Leaving the comforts of home behind, I lived in my '88 Dodge Ram camper van. I planned to capture everyday life as I saw it. With my Pentax 6x7 hanging around my neck, I photographed everything looking down; using the waist level viewfinder. Once I arrived back to Toronto, I had 70+ rolls of medium format film to be processed. I am still sorting through these photographs, scanning these negatives and continuously adding to this collection of photographs.

Evelien Vanderstraeten

Over the course of several weeks, I created the series 'Flipside'. When we think about fairs, most of us will imagine similar things: a bright and sunny day, loud music playing in the background, children running around and people laughing, a carefree atmosphere... But what happens when you take those same people out of the picture - quite literally? When everything is abandoned and closed down? I wanted to explore this almost parallel universe. The silence and sadness stuck to me from the very beginning, and kept on fascinating me throughout this project

Marco Del Zotto

Withetude is work about the Venice lagoon. The landscape becomes a still life where the blizzard takes the place of the photographic studio "backdrop". In this context, I extrapolate the loneliness that transmits this place to me, making it tangible. In love with the landscape, during my travels I try to capture what nature tries to transmit through its "architectural compositions".

Sergey Melnitchenko

At one moment, spending time in video chat with my friends I was surprised by interesting hobby of some young and not so young people from different countries to show the camera their genitals, and sometimes making it with the most extraordinary ways. I started devoting more time to these chats, especially trying to find such people. I waited until I come across such a companion, then “photographed” him by pressing “Prt Sc”. For all the time I spent in the video chats, I captured about 200-300 of such characters, and then selected the most interesting in my opinion. This is how the left side of the picture became. For the right side, I chose trees. Photos with them were created with the use of a mobile phone with 3.2 megapixel camera, monitor, and “Google”. I compared the left side with the pictures of trees, as they are, I think, represent loneliness the most.

Lorenzo Valloriani

The memory of the present is a photographic exploration of the actual Tuscan area in Italy, photographed between 2017 and 2018 in over 40 urban and suburban locations. This ongoing project captures the most mundane and typical elements of landscape - countryside crossroads, vernacular architectures, river banks, memorial statues, ruins of ancient walls, postwar buildings infrastructure - that could be seen virtually in any tuscan locality. 

It's also a work about collective memory and archetypes: the project focuses expecially on the altered landscape, urban and rural in equal parts, trying to emerging, to eyes and mind, the image of the everyday landscape that we tend unconsciously to suppress.

Jack Minto

Maryland Parkway | The ‘City of Lights’ guise of Las Vegas, Nevada, exists only to a 4 mile run known as the ‘Strip’. Walk a little east or west of this and find yourself
within a world overshadowed by the billion-dollar entertainment industry, fuelled by tourists who travel from all over the world to get a piece of the action. When the thrill seekers, gamblers and party goers have reached the end of their hedonistic and excessive bout, they head back home, but for many, the city is home, a desert city, recovering ever so slowly from economic hardship.

Nicholas Gaffney

To photograph something is, often, to choose to make a seemingly insignificant subject meaningful. Significance can be found in the eeriness of wooden people placed in a corn maze, or in the beauty of an old amusement park ride called Orbiter.

Michael Froio

The Pennsylvania Railroad was one of the most storied institutions in American history, operating the largest railroad in the US for over a century. The PRR, as it was known, developed infrastructure, engineering standards and traffic systems that still carry trains today on a system that evolved continually through its long history.

Tito Mouraz

One of the most impressive memories of mine is the one of Cabine Street, at Lapa do Lobo. It was where I spent a great number of my school holidays, in the house, at my grandparents' grocery or at Vale do Boi, where my grandfather did his farming.