Temporary dwellings

«The photographic project» tell us the architect Andrea Bosio describing his series Home Sweet Home «starts from the observation of the complex and rigid structure of the contemporary city. Each area has its function and every resident has his role within it. However, there are lacerations in this mesh, both in the urban and social level: it is precisely in these interstices of evanescent reality that some people find “self made” rescue footings. I am speaking of those people who by choice or for unrelated reasons find themselves without a real social position and homeless. Nearly transparent and strangers to the city, this people live in more or less marginal areas of the metropolis. The pavement is usually their bed, sometimes a bench… The most enterprising build their selves a refuge in the shade of the buildings between the spaces defined by the local urban planning. Paradoxical situations of the consumerist and globalized society: small huts built with recycled materials behind shopping centers or buildings symbolic buildings. (more…)

Tourist forever

Reality is no doubt cultural representation, a mirror of our selves as expressions of a society. The landscape does not lie after all. And, probably, the Canadian photographer David Pollock is right when he reminds us in the introduction to his writing that the virtual experience enables a widespread access but it still means a loss in the richness of details.

«The pictures are primarily meant to present everyday world in a manner that reveals our involvement in a world of symbols. Many of the images reflect our symbolic representations of the natural world in a constructed landscape and connect to images of paradise(paradise is often depicted as a garden (cultured nature). I think the symbol of Adam and Eve’s fall is the fall from the protection of culture and the consequent resulting consciousness of their own mortality. These ideas are influenced by the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker and his 1974 Pulitzer prize winning book “Denial of Death” which changed the way I see the world. I live in a tourist environment and link photography and tourism (the ‘tourism industry’ and photography are profoundly connected) that alludes to our world of images and consequent framing of realty. Susan Sontag said this over 30 years ago: “Photography makes everyone a tourist in everyone elses’ reality and eventually in ones’ own”.»

Natural outstandings

We like to return on Chris Mottalini’s portfolio, after having written about his series Mistake By The Lake, to report a curious as unprecedented evolution in his expressive research toward a constructivism of reality and more especially of nature. A nature ambiguosly represented and contaminated through the introduction of natural yet indigenous elements. A manipulation occasionally made even more explicit by the presence of extraneous and artificial objects. Mottalini chooses a smaller scale to draw and interpret, in a personal way, a very common theme. He offers us a soft vision, less impressive and insidious, however, symbolic of human action on the environment. And it seems that these microrealities placed in the foreground by Mottalini and originated from a personal experience, that of subscribing to a mineral club, deliberately pose unresolved questions. In this sense we rediscover Mottalini’s style, that explores the unexpected with ease, and leaves the viewer a residual room of interpretation.

Mammals in the city

No city is ever the same. In part because like any organism it grows and changes over time and partly because no matter how hard you look it will never be enough to see it all. The work of René Schmalschälger in this sense is an investigation that reflects the desire to discover a city and its myriad representations.

«By photographing the city I’m describing the people that build it, the city as the handwriting of human action. What and where I photograph is part random ‒ just happen to be there ‒ and part rational ‒ dropping myself into a chosen area. By avoiding people in the photos, I avoid the automatic emotional reactions that people have to other people. Using an abstract aesthetics, I seek to help the viewer to stay away from clichéd associations, irony, cynicism, sarcasm or social statements, because they often are rooted in platitudes. A city is a place where the largest portion of the space is private. The private space is where people feel free to be themselves, as opposed to the public space where they have to be social. (more…)

Whose land?

Landfills, dams, manufacturing and housing units, yards, quarries, railway tracks, overpasses, marginal areas, scrap, functions and transformations impacting territories, questionable land use methods, these are the geographic portraits of photographer Jason Koxvold. With a compassionate, patient, cynical but always elegant look he explores aware the landscapes of the transition from the abandoned Detroit to the postcomunist suburbs, from the bulimic Asia to the Japanese hyper productivity. A schizophrenic mosaic that reproduces a Lilliputian land, a swarm of activities, buildings, and views, dense, frenetic and often gray. Whose land we wonder.

«My interest in landscapes grew from a need to explore man’s desire to control his environment - to tame nature. We have a remarkable need to make things rectangular and paint them black, white, or beige. This process of changing the land is sometimes incredibly rapid, at other times so slow that it’s almost imperceptible. These moments of change often go unseen or unnoticed; in documenting it, I find a lot of intersections between the beauty of the image and the cynicism in the observation.»

Dark and light

«A recent mission to Mars sent back to Earth amazingly clear photographs of the planet’s landscape.» Tamir Sher seems to jokingly provoke when he introduce his artistic project “Mars.” His visual alterations, however, tell of familiar images made deliberately alien. Not a trivial attempt to appropriate reality and edit it to his liking, but the desire to make universal what is daily taken for granted. A fence, a building, a prefabricated, a cemetery, symbolically become iconic pieces of a landscape fragmented, disconnected and often deprived of its identity. Places that seem to belong to us to a certain point, beyond which they enter into a flat and absolute dimension, where boundaries and proportions, certainties and conclusions disappear. «Below, the artificial ephemera of our world. Above, the natural ethernity of the universe.» A dark and extinguished night that almost paradoxically enhances the light and the shapes of the day, making them more vivid, less banal and somehow different. A visual contrast that drives us to be less indifferent to our environment?

Shared projections

It is perhaps characteristic of the Portuguese people, always looking out to the sea, to scan the horizon for new directions towards which pushing themselves, leaving behind what is most reassuring and defined, sending further goals and expectations. Photographer João Henriques is not immune from this tendency as he himself tells us.

In “Capital Reflex” I tried to find images that could be used as a metaphor to the current state of the Portuguese scene. Despite the title it should concern not only economical aspects, but also suggest a larger frame that would include social, political and other aspects as well, as a reconnaissance that everything is interconnected. Most of these dynamics are common with other cultures and countries so if language could be a barrier to a more global identity, images might break that obstacle driving us to a realm of shared experience. In a more inward approach, landscape or the local are here seen as places of projection of expectations, conventions and preconceived notions, that can be defined not only by its mediation and “mediatisation”, but also through an experiential relationship. The aim of using man altered landscapes and places is to tap the potential of the image both as a document and as a trigger of emotions.

Hasty conclusions

The first impression is of entering a movie set on a postnuclear stage. Objects and things seem so out of place that the vision proceeds uncertain in an almost surreal atmosphere. A work that runs on the thread of ambiguity and proceeds jerkily through small clues that only at the end, thanks to the author’s words, we can gather in a story. The place is real, and it is on this disorienting perceptual effect that Kuletsky builds his photographic tale. We are at Solotvyno in Ukraine about 300 meters below ground. What once was a salt mine is now home to a clinic for respiratory diseases. Here people come to cure asthma and other bronchial and bronchioles disorders. Is called speleotherapy, tells us Kuletsky, and was discovered in Poland in the 1950’s when some scientists noticed that people who worked in salt mines rarely suffered from tuberculosis. Satisfied with this geography lesson we can now going back to the photos and start all over again our trip thorugh the tunnels and spaces of the underground clinic, smiling to ourselves and to our hasty conclusions. We are comforted by the fact that for once, the imagination has prevailed over reality.

Calm inspirations

The Scandinavian shots of David Salvi are the result of a long and romantic style research that feeds sentimentally on reality. A kind of obsession that, as the photographer suggests us, becomes «inspiration made of sounds, and smells, long thoughts and extreme attention to details. There are millions, billions and there are many more unknown to me.» A sensibility that is translated into an approach to life: «observing the reality through a lens makes me feel protected, makes me feel unattainable, and according to my mood I feel able to take what I want, and to discard the rest. I hardly try to create the necessary conditions to bring in a picture a thought or a precise scene. I have always preferred to seek the original version elsewhere, so that I can feel and touch it personally, immortalizing it to my taste.» Snapshots with no post production return us respectfully northern atmospheres strictly on medium format. «Maybe a little too forcefully I joined a “square” perspective that now I can not imagine otherwise.»

Limelight

There is no doubt that the places photographed by Karin Borghouts are real. Yet their being in perfect balance between reality and imagination takes the viewer aback, raises doubts and curiosity. Reverse on the viewer an inescapable sense of alienation that lasts for long and is reinforced by the image that follows, giving a complete sense to this surprising series, and together multiplying its countless possibilities of interpretation. The more ambiguous and misleading arise the images the more precise and flawless is the gaze of the Belgian photographer, that becomes itself a “builder” of places, a not entirely objective witness of some kind of staged nature, subjected to a mere tool of composition. Fragments of an everyday reality, intended as such only if they are fully seized, are juxtaposed and aligned as individual characters to form new meaningful sentences, resulting in a language that does not tell of public spaces, zoos and amusement parks anymore, but the relationship between reality and the viewer, irretrievably placed into question. References to art history, to painting in particular, and to set design, help to fuel this kind of unsolvable riddle, between indisputable truths and illusions, between the pure perception and the certainty of being part of a well-known world.

Anthropological frescoes

The look mature and aware of the London based photographer Freya Najade seems to prefer the study of controversial issues of the contemporary social acting. Her works as modern frescoes depict in a pictorial perspective specific behaviors and deviant implications of post modern society. Anthropological aspects that trigger real short-circuits in the mind of the beholder as in the formidable series hereby presented.

«Elvis and my Family reflect on the ways, in which people decorate their workplaces and intertwine their private life with their public life by bringing pictures and objects from their homes. Furthermore I attempt with this project to preserve a fraction of the urban landscape, which will eventually disappear. Not just family owned but also small and medium-sized enterprises are vanishing due to different trends in times of globalization. Chain stores dominate mostly the urban environment, which don’t welcome a personal aesthetization of a place.»

Isolated comparments

«Through a shrill loudspeaker, she asks me to repeat myself. I poke a few bills through the slot. Out of the corner of my eye I notice someone behind the yellow line on the floor. I see my own reflection and press myself closer to the glass in order to read her lips. She scrapes the microphone and the loudspeaker screeches again. A ticket comes back through the slot. For a split second I touch her fingertip before our meeting is over. A signal sounds and behind me someone crosses the line.»

Taken during the autumn of 2007 these images of the young Swedish visual artist David Molander depict places and space where one of the individuals is screened off, closed-in and perhaps even protected in an isolated compartment. However these presences, so framed as to seem little comforting, speak of a silent and familiar urban poetic, made up of brief gestures, and fleeting glances, and words left over in the rush to move elsewhere or to stay on the move fearing not to appear at all. Figures taken by surprise, real as pathetic, seem frozen in a position that causes us some embarrassment and an unattractive feeling.

Collateral damages

«I am looking for places that conserve a trace of the demolished architectural structure that in a sense speak of the political-economical situation of a country that is finding a way to inject its economy by turning their backs to growing centrally and promoting and subsidizing the mass construction of housing complexes in the out skirts of the metropolitan area». And the suburbs of large cities in Mexico become in the photographs by Alejandro Cartagena the mirror of a relentless urban transformation, solely dictated by the laws of a market that only apparently follows precise and inevitable dynamics, and often is surprising even the so-called planners with swerves and unplanned developments. The signs of this quest for profits are there for everyone, and these wounds inflicted on the body of the city and its more immediate region are the true focus of research of the Dominican photographer. (more…)

Southern wrecks

The Southern Italy, as portrayed by Sandro Messina, appears as a universe itself, a reality that makes of its uniqueness the only possible clue, even more if our gaze is focused on Sicily, almost exalted and sublimated by being island, an inviolable and contemptuous fortress which turns its back on the world, yet tormented inside. A hollow pot to contain the most diverse stories and cultures and lives, as tearing conflicts for centuries past and for those to come. The places represented in the series Bridge return a kind of unresolved medley between the wild nature of the Strait of Messina’s surroundings and the signals more or less evident of the impending environmental disturbances, while Our Heritage highlights the contacts sometimes strident between the use of land and its extraordinary archaeological heritage. Yet, common to both projects, is a subtle sense of alienation that arises in the people who observes these places through their impeccable photographic representation, and in those who live and pass through them like person, as if the imposing Temple of Agrigento or some neglected residential neighborhood attacked by the vegetation near Messina were individual finds of the same indefinite parallel dimension, not quite earthly, the one of the myths that are lost in time.

Sample places

There is something special that binds the photographer Inge Stolwijk to the Dutch city called Woerden. A city that for decades has been statistically established as the Most Average Town in the Netherlands. A sort of sample place where to test products, verify researches and so on. Her gaze moves generically across this apparent geographic normality to depict people and spaces as a familiar poetic that feeds on thin details and small identities to make the sky less grey and thick.

«I think I have always been more concerned with raising a question than with finding an answer. I am interested in the things in life that we consider to be “normal”, that we see as something certain. In my work I try to make the viewer think twice about these things. I was born and raised in Woerden and I’ve always been amazed by the Average phenomenon. When I started this project, I thought I was trying to show the extraordinary within the things we consider to be ordinary. (more…)