Alexa Cushing

Alexa Cushing

Dana Stirling

Seeing Is Believing | With time, personal perceptions of reality begin to shift. Our sentimental connections to a particular place feel as though they are less powerful. Instead, we separate ourselves from the meaningful embraces that are often linked to the places we grew up. This change gives way to the disconnect from what we once understood as familiar, and in turn reveals a more vague relationship with our own surroundings.

A place originally created to provide a sense of safety and community to its residents now displays relicts of the past and the once glorified idea of society. These photographs reveal a tension that is tangled between the landscape and its current community. With visual traces that represent the harsh impacts of time, weather, and people, we are reminded that a place can be just as vulnerable as life. The people of this community exist within the hieroglyphics of the landscape. The human relationship to a familiar place is no longer one we recognize, but instead it has become something that is unbalanced. With this in mind, we can begin to understand how our past memories pollute our current experience with a familiar place. www.alexacushing.com

Alexis Vasilikos

Alexis Vasilikos

Dana Stirling

Art is a spiritual experience, it's not about conveying messages or anything in particular, it's more like a communion with the timeless core of existence, a revelation of the fundamental unity of form and formlessness, of what we are and what we appear to be.

Courtesy of Can Christina Androulidaki Gallery

www.alexisvasilikos.net

Ashley Miller

Ashley Miller

Dana Stirling

Sweet Things | The still life series, Sweet Things, was photographed in a studio, captured on film, and printed in a color darkroom. Owing to their careful arrangements, the images take a stab at the unnerving sides of consumerism. The work picks and pulls at the embodied anxieties from insatiable capitalism, chewing over desire, bodies, and fetish objects. www.ashleymillerphoto.com

Michelle Rogers-Pritzl

Michelle Rogers-Pritzl

Dana Stirling

Not Waving But Drowning | Not Waving But Drowning is a look inside an Evangelical marriage. These images show the truth of a life lived in the confines of oppressive gender roles, cult-like manipulation, and the isolation of Fundamentalism.

Each image is equivalence for the unseen, for the reality behind facade. Despite the smiles and appearance of perfection, Complementarianism is an abusive system in which a wife serves her husband as a helpmeet, remains silent, and prays for her spouse to become a better man. The man is the head of the woman, and the woman is to do what she is told. Even her body is not her own. Because churches worship the institution of marriage as a reflection of Christ's relationship with the church pastors put the institution above the people in it. If a woman leaves she will be shunned.

I use self-portraiture to share my own experience within the Fundamentalist Lifestyle without being explicitly autobiographical; I unmask what is beneath the veneer of "perfect" marriages and families. My chosen medium of collodion used with contemporary digital media represents the outdated behaviors and rules imposed on women by Fundamentalism.

The title of the series is taken from the Stevie Smith poem by the same name. The title suggests a kind of frantic despair beneath the surface of a smiling, perfect demeanor.  It represents the woman who smiles every Sunday while protecting her husband with silence and prayers for change.

The image titles come from The Awakening by Kate Chopin and are sequenced by their titles’ place within the story. Unlike Mrs. Pontellier, I choose to thrive in my freedom. I seek to unmask, to reveal truth. Growing up in Fundamentalist Christianity, I endured the cognitive dissonance of wearing the smiling facade to mask the oppressive truth. By unmasking that truth, I set myself free from the burden of my silence. This is my protest. I will no longer be silent. I choose to live. www.michellerogerspritzl.com

Corey Isenor

Corey Isenor

Dana Stirling

Once Around the Sun  | Once Around the Sun is a chronological collection of photographs spanning the entire year of 2015. Documenting adventures, friendships, parties, and everything else in between, these images explore a year in my life; a somewhat external self-portrait. All photographs were taken on 35mm film with a Leica R4s camera. www.coreyjisenor.com

Michiko Chiyoda

Michiko Chiyoda

Dana Stirling

Starting a New Journey | After a long struggle with sickness, my mother passed away. Since then I have made a lot of trips while captured by undigested mixed feelings. I have chosen to visit seaside, because I remember what my mother used to say to me before she died. “Michiko, I want to go to seaside and feel the breeze.” While seeing the horizon way out there, all the memories of her was back to me.
We used to often take a walk together around open fields in our neighborhood. As she was a good walker, I think she would enjoy walking around the seashore tirelessly. Now, she’s gone and I can’t see and touch her again. However, I feel her all the more because I know that I can never build up the relationship with her any more.

I might be able to describe those trips of mine as pilgrimages in order to face my mixed feelings about my mother.

‘Osorezan’, which is located on the northern tip of the Honshu island, is one of the places I visited. This sacred site has existed for over a thousand years. It is known as the place where people can contact with the departed. People who visit there try to console the spirits of their loved one by piling up stones and laying flowers, so, I did the same thing, and I surely felt it was the right place to talk with my mother.

What does “mourning for a departed soul” mean? When you lost someone, you might feel that person deep in your mind and you might recall the relationship and your memories of events with them. People exist in relation to each other. However, once they die, their materiality comes to exist only in someone's mind. Someone who has passed away could be assimilated into one's mind, so to speak, and become a part of that person, in their memories and emotions. I have been asking myself whether feelings toward someone who has passed away is our own internal conflict and if mourning means to keep going forward with that conflict.

On realizing it, I felt that I merged with all the memories of my mother rather than living with them. At the same time, it was strange but the loneliness came up to my mind. I have never felt like that before. It’s sad a little bit but I found the feeling of elation had grown in my mind, too. It is like the feeling before starting a new journey. www.michikochiyoda.com

Rick Wright

Rick Wright

Dana Stirling

Vessels of the Late Petroleum Age | A work of dada archaeology: collecting, photographing, and cataloging present-day plastic bottles like an archaeologist from c. 4300 A.D.
There are 27 digital photographs in the collection—printed with tri-tone pigment ink on Hahnemühle Bamboo paper. rickwrightstudio.com

Sharon Draghi

Sharon Draghi

Dana Stirling

Split Tree Road |
“Love is the quality of attention we pay to things.”  - J.D. McClatchy 


Split Tree Road is an ongoing project about myself, my family and the place we live in. By capturing quiet moments alone, as well as our shared life together, I’m exploring ideas about privacy, intimacy, self awareness and the passage of time. I use candid and staged imagery with the intention of deliberately blurring the boundaries between what is true and what is imagined. I’m also interested in looking at how our environment brings context to our daily lives. The suburbs can be breathtakingly beautiful and sinister at the same time, and I want to show both the peace and isolation that one can feel living out here. 

Despite the fact that we may be surrounded by friends and family – and if we are lucky we receive love and stability through these relationships – we go through life alone, confronted with our unique fears, struggles, dreams and desires. It is this sense of existential loneness that I want to capture in my work.

Maya Meissner

Maya Meissner

Dana Stirling

The Cedar Lodge | Growing up in Northern California with horticulturalist parents, Yosemite National Park was my family’s Mecca, and in September of 1998 we took our first pilgrimage there. We stayed at the Cedar Lodge, a roadside motel. I returned to the park years later as a teenager pursuing my love of photography, excited to channel Ansel Adams and the other greats who came before me, in the birthplace of landscape photography. It’s hard for me to comprehend human horrors in Yosemite, one of the most majestic natural places on this planet.

In 2014, my mom revealed that during our idyllic childhood vacation a man tried to break into our motel room in the middle of the night. My dad scared him away by yelling; my sister and I slept through the whole thing. Five months after our trip, four women were brutally murdered in Yosemite. Three of the women, a mother and two teenage girls, had disappeared from the Cedar Lodge. The confessed killer was the handyman there.

My mom didn't have the tools to process this encounter and the twist of fate that spared our family, and so the guilt and grief festered within her for fifteen years. Learning that four women were killed in a place I considered paradise was confounding, but that I could have been one of them wasn’t something I could shake off or even really understand. I just knew I couldn’t keep these feelings building within me, like my mom had. My tool for delving into myself has always been my art.

Through research and the gathering of images, I began to lay out the disjointed narratives that crossed paths at the Cedar Lodge. To understand and illustrate my place within, or rather alongside the tragedy, my connection and my disconnect, I made collages: fracturing, obscuring, and layering images that included the photos that my parents had taken in 1998 and my teenage landscapes. I approached the project from varying perspectives because of my own confusion, but also to illustrate that this wasn’t really my story. This is not my trauma; we survived. The trauma I saw my mom go through does not compare to that of the families who lost their sisters, daughters, mothers.

To complete this project, I returned to The Cedar Lodge. I studied it closely and made new images of it. It’s terrifying to come so close to a nightmare, but I found that as I put it on paper where I could see it, the history of the place became less of a threat. Yosemite and the Cedar Lodge became beautiful again. www.mayameissner.com

Martha Ketterer

Martha Ketterer

Dana Stirling

La Luna Los Cabos | La Luna Los Cabos is a visual exploration of time and nature. This work looks at our perception of motion, where time is seamless, spacious and invisible and water is physical, fluid and everchanging. Each composition consists of multiple images that allows us to feel endless motion. Here, movement is most evident at the interface, the zone between sea and sand.

This project was photographed during nights of the full moon on the Summer Solstice. The timing and location of this work was critical to its creation. Los Cabos, Mexico is uniquely situated at the confluence of the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific Ocean allowing the recording of both the moonrise and moonset over the water each evening. The moon provided beautiful light as it travels through the night sky, marking time on the sands of the tide by its physical influence and constant gravitational pull. www.marthaketterer.com

JP Terlizzi

JP Terlizzi

Dana Stirling

The Good Dishes | The Good Dishes integrates memory, legacy and metaphor with my response to loss. As I witnessed family members pass, my cousins and I were each tasked with the emotional challenge of cleaning out the family home. Sorting through the heirlooms, we would determine which item should be tossed, sold, or preserved. Without fail, when it came to the family’s fine china, that item was always given to the person that most cherished its memory and sentimental value.

Growing up in a large Italian family, everything was centered around food and the family table. I remember vividly my mother’s vintage marigold stoneware dishes that she bought at the grocery store back in the early 1970s. She used them every day for as long as I could remember, and they had a life of their own. Along with my mother’s everyday dishes she had one set that she kept on display behind glass that only she handled, only she washed, and only she hand-dried; these were deemed “the good dishes.” Eating is a physical need, but meals are a social ritual. Whenever I heard, “I need to use the good dishes,” that meant one of two things in our household: the priest was coming over for dinner or it was a very special occasion. Either way, the food presentation, table dress and table manners all changed whenever the good dishes came out.

Utilizing the passed down heirlooms of friends and family, The Good Dishes celebrates the memory of family and togetherness. It borrows the stylized rituals of formal tableware and draws inspiration from classic still life paintings. Presentation, etiquette and formality are disassociated by using food and fine china in unconventional ways as a metaphor for the beauty and intimacy that is centered around meal and table. www.jpterlizziphotography.com

Ekaterina Vasilyeva

Ekaterina Vasilyeva

Dana Stirling

Bermuda Triangle | ​Probably in every major industrial city there is such a place.
A place full of determination to subordinate you to it, forcing you suffocate or even just disappear. In my hometown of St. Petersburg (Russia) for me such a place are two traffic arteries or, more accurately, the Obvodny Canal and the Obukhov Defense Prospect which, if you look at the map, may well correspond to two sides of a triangle. And all three meeting points of the triangle sides belong to the Neva River.

This is the place through which you pass every time you drive from the so-called ''sleeping'' areas to the city center.

Or maybe this place is not a place? A certain border zone - in fact the District of the Obvodny Canal in the old days was the outskirts of the city and enjoyed the notoriety of a place of mystic. Regardless of such mystical glory, by the end of the 20th century - the beginning of the 21st century, the Bermuda Triangle ceased to function and, in a sense, many factories, cultural centers and even the Warsaw Railway Station disappeared.

In the mid of 19th century the Obvodny Canal was connected with the beginning of the industrial revolution in St. Petersburg and in Russia. Now collecting my story, I do populate this place with ghosts - found photos of workers from a photographic lab of an abandoned Rubber factory ''Red Triangle'', which once was very successful and prosperous.

As the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman said: ''As far as the power of obsession changes the space, giving birth to a place, so the power of the place is reconstructs the obsession itself.
By this point, we can no longer say that it is a ghost somewhere; but we are forced to say that everywhere it becomes the air itself, which we breathe and which secrete, in the process of especial breathing, the walls around us''.
I can only modestly add that one of the artist's tasks is to question the reality. www.ekaterinavasilyeva.ru

Benedetta Ristori

Benedetta Ristori

Dana Stirling

LAY OFF | In recent times many states have proceeded with a reshaping of working, intensifying the pace to cope with economic crisis due to the massive challenge and competition of the international markets. We are seeing a considerable increase in shifts of night work that, in the current organizational model of production, is gradually coming to be one of the most profitable among producing and conditions of employment of labor. This mode of shift work, once the preserve of industrial sectors, is instead now spreading significantly also in the service sectors, occupying a place of first order in areas, for example, such as communications and trade, the operators of call center and operators selling to the public, characteristics of the “global village” that no longer differences between day and night.

Shift work, even at night and on holidays, now covers more than eight million workers targeted, often, of psycho-physical due to the continuous change between the “biological clock” that marks the rhythm of the body, following the natural alternation of day and night, and the requirements imposed by the “society of work” that does not recognize these natural alternations (social jet lag).

My intention with this project, is to spy on the moments of life of these workers, analyzing and showing the characteristic that, in most cases, distinguishes them: loneliness. I tried to catch this loneliness and make it visible through this timeless and spaceless atmosphere. The project is still ongoing. www.benedettaristori.com

Casey Bennett

Casey Bennett

Dana Stirling

Hub City | Hub City focuses on life in Williams Lake, British Columbia, an area of the province that has gone through significant cultural and socioeconomic transformations. Located in the Central Cariboo Interior, where individuals’ collective livelihoods and lifestyles have been, and are, currently heavily dependent upon certain industries–particularly the logging and mining industries. Generations of families have committed their lives and passed on an “identity” of working these jobs, becoming culturally bound to these careers. My photographic project hopes to instill a visually compelling collection of images of this specific place in time and the prospect for insight into the community and its individuals who have shaped a region and created the character of a place. The environment is loaded with evidence from the past that is now layered with subtle manifestations about the inevitable future.

Aptly titled Hub City, this refers to Williams Lake as the central location that sits in the junction of Highway 97 and Highway 20, leading major routes to cities and points of interest like Kamloops (south), Bella Coola (west) and Prince George (north). www.caseybennett.net

Ira Wagner

Ira Wagner

Dana Stirling

Twinhouses of The Great Northeast | The twinhouses of The Great Northeast neighborhood of Philadelphia reflect how people share a common border. Some families choose to mark their space with a fence or shrubbery.  Others differentiate themselves with varying architectural elements and subtle changes to trim, windows and paint colors.  One family chooses to hide completely behind a tall hedge; another lives in front of the house with common backyard elements – chairs, grills, patio tables, open for all to see.  Common upkeep, such as mowing the lawn, ends at a rough approximation of the property line rather than being shared.  One side of a structure shows pride of ownership, the other is missing a shutter on a window. When borders are such an important issue in the world, these images reflect a human inclination to mark and delineate one’s space rather than share it.

The Great Northeast section of Philadelphia shows what was built in response to the search for the American dream, even within the city limits. These modest homes are variations on a theme of two side-by-side houses that share a common wall.To create some variety, architectural elements appear pasted on the front of the box – various materials, gables, dormers, rooflines and trim.Because of the shared occupancy within a single structure, little has changed in these houses since they were built.As a result, this area of Philadelphia shows much of the original intent of the architects, developers and residents.Yet, over time, small differences have emerged that reflect how people live together as neighbors, differentiate their own property, customize their slice of suburban living and make their property their own. www.iwagner100.com

Cristina Rizzi Guelfi

Cristina Rizzi Guelfi

Dana Stirling

Dream House | In the house time slow down, hair on the floor look darker without a linoleum frame. Something scorching haunts the flats.All movement carefully crafted, taking notes of the chairs position, how the curtains let the light in, way too many ornaments on every surface. Housing women coming from nowhere, at the foot of a shitty hill, builded upside-down, little screws stabbed in the joints, wired deep under a fragile skin, right through the nails.

Flimsy monsters, dressed in chiffons and ballerinas shoes.Surrounded by the scent of hair dye blended wi' chicken soup, pulled by the hair into a crazy routine, sitting on the green chair of ambiguity ..That golden boring fine line,day after day,same old shit  either with friends or strangers. ..homes,walls painted too bright,smell of fear,a call to run away..Houses hide every secrets. cristinarizziguelfi.tumblr.com

Vamsi Krishna

Vamsi Krishna

Dana Stirling

Wings | The special in the mundane – stories hidden in plain sight – the devil in the details.

I do photography since I see it as the truest expression of my personality. Flowing lines, diverse and harmonic colour palettes, and rich blacks and whites are all essential elements present in my photographs. While many of my pictures have a sense of distance and objectivity, I also try to find stories in the smallest of objects.

Electric pylons, water, flora, everyday objects, street pickings, dead bugs, graves, living faces, and interesting places, are mostly the subjects I work with.

My work is heavily influenced by my complicated relationship with people, the diverse forms of music I listen to, the literature I read, and the art I appreciate. vamsifoto.wordpress.com

Jeremy Knowles

Jeremy Knowles

Dana Stirling

8AM WALKS | 8am Walks is built upon one simple instruction: Leave the house at 8am with a camera and walk.

This ongoing series seeks out colour and vibrancy in Germany's grey capital, and catalogues a specific time of day with a unique pattern of light. Taken as part of a daily routine over the course of over two years, images from this series document overlooked and unnoticed aspects of Berlin life and bring greater exposure to the patterns, repetitions and coincidences that disrupt the dull.


Vol. 1 of this series was made between 2017 and 2018, and features photographs taken within Berlin neighborhoods along morning walks. www.jeremyknowles.co.uk

Allen Morris

Allen Morris

Dana Stirling

ISO | Landscape, cultivated from nature through the hands of humans in an effort to drive the needs and wants of a society, is the metaphor that I use in this body of work to explore the ideas of history, security, identity and place both in geographical and psychological terms.

 Even when living in an urban environment, I believe that there is a connection that humans seek out between themselves and the landscape that they inhabit. As creatures, we make connections to the spaces that we inhabit; we attempt to intertwine the narratives of place with our own individual story to form a connection with our geographical and psychological places in life. This drive to meld with the population that surrounds us, or the landscape that we find ourselves existing within, provides a sense of stability and security.

However, when epochal changes occur within our own individual history, the security that we seek from our physical surroundings and those with whom we interact becomes more difficult to find. It is the search for those feelings of stability in a time of place insecurity that can be seen in the photographs that comprise “ISO”.

Using the landscape as a stage on which to act out these feelings of insecurity, “ISO” explores the tense feeling of uncertainty felt while searching for something to hold on to - a place of security and permanence in which to take root. The moments of stability provided by these static objects found within these photographs provide a brief moment of security, reassurance, control, and order in the face of uncertainty and chaos.

ken collins

ken collins

Dana Stirling

Light Touches Paper | Each photograph is a means to discover and develop an invented image. These photographs share the same dimensions and vertical format, allowing for a nuanced experience of interior shapes, light and tonal range. There is a purity in form, execution and materials. The attempt is to create compelling images with light and simple ordinary materials. kencollinsphotographs.com

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