Raymond Thompson Jr

Raymond Thompson Jr

Dana Stirling

Playing in the Dark | I have harvested the power of the sun for my most recent series of self-portrait lumen prints, Playing in the Dark. This work comments on the nature of photography as a scientific process and the role photography has played in reinforcing America’s racial caste system. More importantly the series asks the viewer to look deeper, by purposely deemphasizing my body with various levels of dark tones and colors. My body is not easily consumed in this work. I used the lumen printing process, because the way images are rendered on the surface of the prints creates a shroud that forces the viewer to investigate at close range. The series consists of silver gelatin prints that have been split toned with selenium.

I was inspired by African American photographer Roy DeCarava’s printing technique, which focused on underexposure, soft papers and an incredible range of dark and gray tones. DeCarava was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his book. “The Sweet Flypaper of Life.” In this work he focuses on everyday black life in Harlem. He purposely avoided the imagery that was typically published of blacks that focused on the extremes.

In Teju Cole’s essay, “A True Picture of Black Skin,” published in the book Black Futures, he argues that DeCarava’s darkroom printing palette reverses the power structures associated with the white gaze in photography. “The viewer’s eye might at first protest, seeking more conventional contrasts, wanting more obvious lighting. But, gradually, there comes an acceptance of the photograph and its subtle implications: that there’s more there than we might think at first place, but also that when we are looking at others, we might come to the understanding that they don’t have to give themselves up to us. They are allowed to stay in the shadows if they wish,” Cole writes.

Cole connects DeCarava’s work to philosopher Edouard Glissant’s thinking that surrounds the word “opacity.” In his writing, he claimed a space for the rights of minorities not to be defined by others’ definitions and the right to be misunderstood if they wanted. “Glissant sought to defend the opacity, obscurity, and inscrutability of Caribbean Blacks and other marginalized peoples. External pressures insisted on everything being illuminated, simplified, and explained. Glissant’s response: No.” www.raymondthompsonjr.com

Frances Bukovsky

Frances Bukovsky

Dana Stirling

My creative practice is grounded in where identity and my physical body intersect, with an emphasis on my experience as a chronically ill, disabled, and queer person. I create bodies of work that explore how these aspects of my identity relate to the external world, focusing on my connection to familial support systems, inhabited environments, and medical documentation.

Photography has become an integral practice of healing and self discovery that is central to my artistic expression. My intention is to facilitate conversations about health and disability with vulnerability as a catalyst for empathetically considering broader perspectives.

Themes of privacy within a medical and disability context arise throughout my work as I create images of intimate and emotionally charged moments. By making work in both home spaces and medical environments I encourage the viewer to consider illness as existing beyond a hospital setting, and as something present in the day to day lives of individuals managing ongoing disease.

I use multiple photographic processes in order to approach my personal experience from multiple conceptual perspectives. This allows me to simultaneously highlight the complexity of living inside current societal structures while managing multiple incurable diseases, as well as problem solve how to make invisible illnesses and symptoms apparent in a visual medium. The processes most prevalent in my work include self portraiture with a traditional lens, a variety of film and digital formats, and lumen prints incorporating my personal medical archives.

My work attempts to offer a nuanced view of chronic illness that goes beyond common perceptions of sickness to engage in conversations around the inherent humanness of disability and disease. www.francesbukovsky.com

Sergio Dominguez

Sergio Dominguez

Dana Stirling

The Zahorí | According to the Spanish Royal Academy, a zahorí is a person that has the gift of discovering what is hidden. Employing simple elements, such as a pendulum, it is said they can detect radiations or magnetic fluxes emitted by entities.

Between the limits of document and fiction, “The Zahorí” continues the research that Hugo Caro started back in the 60´s, through his photographs and instruments of dowsing.

This connection between the physical and the spiritual world raises some questions about the nature of the photographic image: Is there a link between the photograph and the person who is photographed? Is the damage (or the cure) of the representation transferred to the represented? Does any of the referent remain in the photographic image? Science denies these practices and relationships, but perhaps, as Borges said, in the architecture of the universe there are unreasonable cracks that we cannot explain. www.sergiodominguez.com.ar

Vasiliki Stamou

Vasiliki Stamou

Dana Stirling

GOOD ENOUGH | Mother good enough. It’s a piece of art trough which I’ am willing to approach the relationship between mother and daughter, it is considered to be important, many-sided, defining, unnegotiable. The starting place of that photographic depiction was my own personal chase and impulsive consideration about the relationship between me and my mother.

Each photograph is an aspect of reality that describer that unique bond.

Winnicott first ever brought in the meaning of “good enough” mother who covers the basic needs of her child, but not all of them, she let’s to be autonomous. She makes it possible to become mature and self. Contained during adulthood. She is neither deficient nor very kind.

Each mother should face the shadows of her own past and complete against them giving real love to her child, she can find the balance between delimitation of her own behavior and the affection that giver to her child.

In that relationship nothing is considered to be given and defined from the beginning. That kind of emotional tie is alive. it is being modified, contextually but mother is always “there”. It’s a cycle of life during which mother turns into daughter and daughter becomes mother. Τwo leading rules in a woman’s life.

That internal pursuit drove me to visit women who attach themselves to that unique relationship, shooting them at their homes, as they are mirrored in my eyes, complicating a dreamy reality balancing between their own reality and my personal imagination.

Harry Rose

Harry Rose

Dana Stirling

Tales From the Road | In 2011 I lost my father to prostate cancer and since then, without fully realising, I let myself fall into a deep depression as I let the grief take a hold. His loss became an anchoring point for all the negative things I felt about myself and the world around me. I was in my first year at university when I lost my father, surrounded by unfamiliar faces in a place I was a stranger to. I found the entire experience to be one of uncertainty and instability. I was still figuring out who I was as an openly queer man navigating a world built for heterosexuals. When I graduated, I threw myself into jobs and experiences to help myself become a success, determined to make something of myself to help ease the pain of what I went through in my early 20s.

Seemingly, my feet never touched the floor. From one job to another, relationship to relationship, I looked for father figures in partners, friends and bosses who simply weren’t up to the task of being what I so desperately needed, a guide through life. A male figure that could understand the feelings I was feeling. I realised that this pursuit for answers on how to live life turned back to the past and I emulated the best characteristics my father had. He was a selfless and enthusiastic man who gave so much energy, time and love to those who deserved it. He was a high school teacher at an all girls school. The impression he made on so many was only fully realised by myself when he passed away, with an outpouring of stories from current and past pupils, saying how much he made them laugh and feel like they could achieve things in life. When he was in hospital before being transferred to the hospice for end of life care, one of the nurses caring for him was a past pupil of his. She told my family it was an honour of hers to give him the care and support that he had given so many. This in itself, as I write, is enough to bring a tear to my eye on how strange, beautiful and unpredictable life can be.

My dad also lost his father to prostate cancer when he was 21 and at university. The parallels of history repeating itself in our family felt tragic and unjust. What made my fathers experience of cancer that much heartbreaking, is that he had lived through it before as a son watching his father slowly pass away. This level of knowing your own fate and the impact it would have on your children and partner whilst being helpless with an incurable disease, truly breaks my heart.

I did my best to repair this broken heart by adopting as many of my fathers positive attributes as I could. Giving my time to people, colleagues, friends and as many people as I could until there was nothing left to give myself. I inevitably filled the whole of losing my father with spending money on clothes, food and drugs. Gaining weight, pushing myself into a deeper depression without knowing what I was doing or anyone around me to tell me what was happening. With the help of friends and a new partner, I was able to address the negative things I was doing to myself, one by one dismantling them until I reached the hardest task of them all, the grief.

After talks with friends and my partner throughout lockdown, I felt I was ready to cast this weight off and let it be carried off with the tides. I wasn’t just cutting off the grief, but the suicidal thoughts and my low self esteem. A new physical horizon was needed, to help build a new one inside of myself. Nobody needs this pain I carry around with me, least of all my father. I want to be better, I want to look upon the world with a learned yet hopeful face. So we packed up our things and headed north, to live on the road as digital nomads.

It was on a walk in Perth, Scotland before our trip began where my boyfriend and I had our first deep conversations about my father and my guilt of not being able to save him. The Christmas before his last, for some reason I went to my room and cried as the rest of my family were laughing and enjoying themselves downstairs. I stil, to this day, don't know why I was crying. Perhaps it was a strange understanding that this might be the last, carefree time my family would all spend together, with all members present. It's in that moment, which I guilt myself over. I knew something bad was coming, just not what. Dad had had back pains for some time, which transpired to be a symptom of his terminal prostate cancer. My boyfriend stressed how I couldn’t have known or done anything, that it wasn’t my fault. With this being the first time I felt able to open up about these feelings, we packed up our things and headed for the open road.

The photographs and words that follow are both a personal diary as well as a travel journal, as I navigate the feelings I have been harbouring and the winding roads and paths at the end of the road. harry-rose.format.com

Andrea Alkalay

Andrea Alkalay

Dana Stirling

Landscape on landscape | The series is an observation into the notion of landscape, which is defined variously, within a gamma of changing ideas about " place". In one of its meanings, is the natural space admirable for its artistic-scenographical aspect. We experience it according to our perceptual capability. We see what we know.

I am interested in the idea of nature as a cultural construction and the composition of a new landscape with other readings.

The relationship between photography and the landscape is insufficient, considering that lens can capture neither the experience nor its magnificence. I explore the illusory of a natural landscape image and its chromatic decomposition, transferring what is caught by sight to the codes of another system (RGB).

The series introduces a dialogue between figuration/abstraction where the real and the manipulated overlap.

In the foreground is the monochrome scenery and behind, its digital backstage. These double photographs combine opposing codes that attract each other, as the perception of color through its absence or the flatness of paper through its fold.

The chromatic palettes are revealed through pleating the edges or folding for volume the print with another topography, irrupting the natural geography in parallel. The range of colors that emerge seems artificial at a glance, although they belong to the natural world. They are working as a code bar breaking the surface illusion to draw attention to the artifice and materiality of the photographic representation. www.andrealkalay.com

Dana Benoit

Dana Benoit

Dana Stirling

Me Myself and Why | “Me Myself and Why” is a collection of photos that is representative of a time of massive change and shift in perspective in my life, as I navigated stillness and solitude and found joy there. These images capture my longing for connection and often have a sense that someone has just left; a hint of presence lingers. I clear my mind by studying light – chasing it, catching it, in all of its fleeting and seasonal changes. I remain endlessly curious. I find calm in perfectly or imperfectly placed shadows and symmetry.

A period of work, unrest yet too much rest, searching, and observing the landscapes; both foreign and familiar. danabenoit.darkroom.tech

Brittany Severance

Brittany Severance

Dana Stirling

Impressions of Domesticity | Impressions of Domesticity is a series of images that observes the daily rituals of my family. I seek to capture the imprint that they create on the space around them. Through my camera I explore how their inhabitance speaks to their personalities, preferences, and the dynamics of the household inside as well as outside their residence.

These photographs explore the human connection to memory and nature. brittanyseverance.wixsite.com/brittany-severance

Becky Mursell

Becky Mursell

Dana Stirling

Becky is a portrait and documentary photographer based in London. She has studied photography at Speos, London and previously worked in the non profit sector for eight years. In her personal work she uses photography to explore themes of mental wellbeing and family and is increasingly looking to incorporate participatory practices within her work. www.beckymursell.com

Naomi James

Naomi James

Dana Stirling

Lockdown Decay; All Our Landscapes Reimagined | All Our Landscapes reimagined is a Polaroid decay project carried out over the course of the three UK lockdowns.

I use a Polaroid SX-70 for much of my photographic work and at the start of the first lockdown, I selected a collection of images I had taken over the preceding months which reflected aspects of my everyday life. I placed sets of images in cleaning solutions- and contained them in boxes, just as, in a sense, we were to be. Polaroid decay is an unpredictable process which felt appropriate for the uncertain times in which we found ourselves.

As the life we knew disintegrated around us, the chemistry of the images altered. During a period when something microscopic had us in its grip, new landscapes with a cellular quality were created in their place. Sharply contrasting the devastating world news, a beauty was emerging- one I was also experiencing in my everyday life as the pace of my life altered and I became more aware of my surroundings.

I started removing the Polaroids and photographing them at key moments as restrictions were lifted. The first prints were taken out on May 13th with the initial easing of measures and the last set of the first series was removed on September 1st when I returned to work.

For the second lockdown, I took photographs of the beach huts at Wells in Norfolk whilst on holiday during the October half term. I knew restrictions were set to tighten again and for the first time heard the term ‘digital Christmas.’ The beach huts, once a symbol of vacations and freedom, suddenly symbolised another impending confinement. I chose to remove all the images on Christmas Day- the Polaroids taking the place of family members and friends I would not see.

During the second lockdown, I remained at work, but as the third was announced, I knew I would be working from home again. I looked to my immediate environment, recording the fabric of my surroundings in my images. Again, photographs were removed at each stage restrictions were lifted.

As life in Britain returns to the closest form of normality we have known for some time, we now hope and wait. As I reflect on this period and these images, I feel there will be elements of permanent change for me- a reimagining of my own landscapes. www.naomi-james.co.uk

Jillian Abir MacMaster

Jillian Abir MacMaster

Dana Stirling

In Kid Years | In Kid Years is an exploration of the balance between frivolous play and the emotional complexity of children. As I photographed my girlfriend’s kids and the kids from our neighborhood more and more, I was witness to the turbulences of playtime, and learned what was most important to them in those moments. Every scratch, scrape, and bruise was indicative of fun.

I never considered myself to be “good with kids,” but as I developed this series, the worry that came with this inexperienced communication dissipated. The camera became the language of choice, and soon enough, the kids from across the park would come knocking on our door asking to be photographed. jillianmacmaster.com

Sue Palmer Stone

Sue Palmer Stone

Dana Stirling

Embodiment — Salvaging a Self | This series represents a salvage operation: I retrieve something of value out of detritus and man-made cast-offs that would otherwise be lost or abandoned. It’s an effort to generate coherence and harmony in a dissonant, fragile, and precarious world.

Hunting for things to capture in neglected or beat-up spaces (a scrap metal yard, alleyway, construction site, behind a strip mall or pizzeria), I often haul items to new sites, or back to my studio, to work with them sculpturally and again photographically. Sometimes photographing them where I find them is enough, sometimes I have a slight hand in modeling or adjusting. These are “readymades” with occasional interventions.

The sculptures I create in my studio communicate obliquely and directly with what draws my attention in the outside world. They are vulnerable and alone, standing up tall, already collapsed, or somewhere in between.

I delight in making and connecting images that speak to each other through shape, color, line, texture, gesture, attitude and atmosphere, often playing with scale to emphasize or distort these relationships. While the objects themselves may carry a sense of loss, loneliness and abandonment, to me, these connections feel playful. www.suepalmerstone.com

Marilyn Boatwright

Marilyn Boatwright

Dana Stirling

they get it honest | In 2019, I began taking photographs of my family when I was visiting them in Florida for the first time. When I returned to my own life in Boston, with the pictures I’d taken and handfuls of images plucked from scrapbooks, I began my current project. They get it honest focuses on my relationship with my family and what it means to return home.

As I worked on this series, I utilized multiple photographic processes like expired film and cyanotype to create a psychological space that addresses the complicated narratives of abuse, neglect, and addiction that I was coping with through therapy and finding myself retraumatized by in new relationships I developed away from home. When taken in as a whole the images make connections between memories, time, and how photography is a meditative practice to build my own personal space and identity. www.marilynjb.photo

Dineke Versluis

Dineke Versluis

Dana Stirling

Bound | All kinds of obstacles attract me, both visually and physically. Walls, bars, fences, foliage. Feeling restricted makes me want to flee. I want to cross borders where I’m not allowed, to climb a fence, to ignore a stop sign, to trespass. I need to travel. To fly away and broaden my horizon. I have to question what’s holding me back. And don’t let others put a limit or a ceiling on my life.

Rotterdam-based photographer and visual artist Dineke Versluis is interested in the boundary between the public and the private self and turns a documentary lens on how people live, work and spend their leisure time. She is often drawn to situations and sites which are momentarily devoid of human activity, captured with an eye for symmetry and detail. dinekeversluis.nl

Lingxue Hao

Lingxue Hao

Dana Stirling

After years of persistent insomnia, loss of interest in my surroundings, marked memory loss, physical pain without cause, unexplained heavy guilt, and erratic anxiety, I went to the hospital for psychiatric tests and was diagnosed with Major Depressive disorder. After going through two years of intermittent treatment, I did not heal, and my struggle intensified due to pressure from my family and their incomprehension of my disorder. As a way to cope with this predicament, I chose to pick up the camera and create a visual language to describe how I live with depression and its manifestations.

My experience with depression is multilayered, and my artistic investigation of it is both personal and challenging, but the goal of my work is never singular or self-centered. These photos represent the torment and pain I experienced as a patient with major depression, and also record the process of my constant struggle with it. What's more, it's a visual diary about a depressive patient that I created as a photographer using lens language. The process of shooting and editing this project is also the process by which I try to find a suitable way to communicate with the outside world and society. The purpose of my works is to help those who may be indirectly impacted by depression to understand mental illness more comprehensively and establish an accurate perspective on the patients. We live in a society where people still hold prejudices against those with mental illness and fail to understand it. My photos serve as a window so that viewers can better understand and offer a helping hand to their families and friends who suffer from the same pain around them. www.lunahao.com

Lisa Mukhina

Lisa Mukhina

Dana Stirling

Not Found | When I turned seventeen I left home. I wanted to know what it was like to be «an adult», but I returned a year later because I figured out that there is no such thing as a «proper adult». I realized that «propriety» was just a an imaginary figment, which we all try to materialize, unsuccessfully. I also realized that as individuals, we actually need other people, and each other, because we are all fundamentally lonely.

I realized that it was only my family that would always be there for me and help me. It is this realization that inspires this series of works. The themes that I tried to convey in this photoset are fear, youth, vulnerability and uncertainty, which grow into sincerity, perseverance, and strength. Simultaneously, the main theme of my work is forgiveness and love. The same love that I feel for my family, and the same forgiveness that I ask of my family, for not being sincere with them before. lisamukhinaph.ru

Ames LeeKing

Ames LeeKing

Dana Stirling

Becomingness | In my photo series, Becomingness , I explore LGBTQIA experiences with vulnerability, bodies, gender, and race. As a non-binary queer person, I photograph people who are on a non-linear relationship with their bodies and what the world projects on to them. Representation of LGBTQIA people in fine art photography remains limited; my aim is to document and honor how we constantly become ourselves in a world that tries to confine us.

During the Pacific Northwest summertime, rivers are a destination, a sanctuary. A critical component of Becomingness is the one hour drive we take to the river together. Building a collaborative relationship with the person in the frame is crucial. It is important that I photograph them in the way they wish to be represented. At the river, we choose a quiet spot with few or no people. Solitude encourages the subject to breathe into themselves. As we explore the area, the photo session is a responding to and a seeing of the person in the environment, rather than directing or executing.

LGBTQIA lives, in our complexity and myriad ways of being, deserve to be documented and honored. Becoming into our bodies is a powerful act of survival and resistance. This is Becomingness .

Kenechi Unachukwu

Kenechi Unachukwu

Dana Stirling

Those Who Think Young | Those Who Think Young is a dive into both the iconic and overlooked places in the greater Madison, Wisconsin area using Pepsi signs as a proxy to investigate concepts such as the American Dream, desire, camaraderie, and isolation. Through the images, an attempt is made to answer the question of where these signs came from and why they are so prevalent; however the inevitable conclusion is that the signs are as much a part of the ecosystem of Madison and the surrounding areas as the locations that they are associated with. All images were taken on Ektar 100 film stock with a Nikon F3. www.kenechiuna.com

Vassilis Konstantinou

Vassilis Konstantinou

Dana Stirling

Pregnant Pauses | In “Pregnant Pauses” photography project, Vassilis Konstantinou captures moments of family and everyday routine, balancing between reality and fantasy. The stage heroes, members of his family and himself, sometimes give the impression of professional actors playing their part and sometimes they appear to portray themselves.

These Pauses imply an ambiguous “before” and an uncertain “after”. In a subtle manner, they attempt to perhaps illustrate the calm before the storm. Photographs standing still in blue, images encouraging the viewer to set them in motion, either in the future or in the past, ultimately revealing or hiding their secrets. www.vassiliskonstantinou.com

Azaan Shah

Azaan Shah

Dana Stirling

Hiraeth | This project is very personal and intimate to me , it started right after I moved to a new place which is quite far from the home where I was brought up. I have attachment to the old home and that area because I started as a photographer by walking the lanes of old city(downtown) so this project is about Homesickness and is very emotional for me.

Life is like earth moving on the axis. You keep moving yet you don’t dislocate. But some are not lucky enough to remain in their own nest forever. A home is a place; a space where longing rests and the soul gets peace. The more one is attached to this space of solace, the more painful is the feeling of being away from it.

The Welsh word ‘Hiraeth’ is an apt expression for such feelings of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness or desire for returning to places we have lost. Life keeps moving, like earth, and brings up new seasons. The rotation of life, from one nest to another, casts a flicker of dark and bright. A bird belongs to the nest yet flies high in the sky, a horse belongs to unending paths yet is tied to a cart, a seed has enough will to sprout even through rocks yet it is rooted deep down, a majestic tree aspires to kiss the heavens but is bound by earth, a man aspires infinitely yet is emotionally attached to his home. I too had my share of rotation. I am now somewhere else, not where I was brought up.

This feeling of homesickness both traps me as well as evokes in me a deep sense of being lost and lonely. The losing of home exemplifies for me the loss of self to the strange ambience of the new place, which offers me nothing except isolation. While my physical being tries hard to reconcile with this new reality my heart still dwells with those familiar faces of downtown and its spiritually soothing ambiance.

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