MADEIRA

MADEIRA

BY TIAGO CASANOVA

“It is now 09:06 of november 9, 2011, and I am onboard the flight TP 1573 (…) The airplane begins to descend. Madeira is down there. From far we can understand the feeling that the fifteenth century discoverers had when they saw Madeira (= Wood) for the first time, and from there we can easily guess the origin of the name. An intense tropical vegetation fills and covers the island of green, but I cannot help but noticing the various urban clusters, scattered houses, roads and highways and the megalomaniac construction of the new airport. The constructed confronts the natural on a dual mode. Large scars are open, but the consummation of the act makes the built elements part of the landscape. This new landscape causes both fascination and disbelief and it is as beautiful as ugly. (…)”

(Excerpt from Travel Diary)

KAYA KWANGA

KAYA KWANGA

BY SIMONE ALMEIDA

Simone Almeida was born in Maputo, Mozambique and lived there until she was 18, then she moved to Oporto, Portugal. She was finalist of the competition "Jovens Criadores" in 2012, with her photographic project "Oblivious". At the moment, she is a photographer and cinematographer based in Porto.

synopsis

"Kaya Kwanga" translates into "My Home". To me, this is Maputo, the place where I grew up surrounded by so many familiar faces. This project is about going back home. Going back to a place that once had such a big impact on my life and that nowadays often feels so foreign to me. Time is a never-ending clockwork that often comes hand in hand with oblivion. As time goes by, slowly and unawarely, we begin to forget faces and places, as well as the the memory of the feelings we once held for them. I cannot accept this. Here I present to you a collection of thirteen carefully chosen photographs of my last trip home. A trip where I had the overwhelming need to photograph, to document all those places and people that once again surrounded me, so that I wouldn't forget them. So that the world wouldn't forget. Because they are too important to not be remembered. If I didn't photograph them, I would lose them. And I don't want that. I like to think that if we photograph the place we call home, it will stop belonging to just us, and it will become a part of everyone who looks at it. That way, we take something so personal and make it universal. This is my Home.

editor´s note

The presented project was selected from a spontaneous submission made by Simone Almeida. Our aim is to disseminate and bring to light telling work of emergent or young photographers.

JOURNEY WITH NO ROUTE

JOURNEY WITH NO ROUTE

BY JOÃO PEDRO MARNOTO

"The great photographers have "magic"- a revealing word that comes from Steichen. I believe that “magical “ photographers" are documentarians only in the broadest sense of the word." 

Berence Abbot in Ensaios sobre Fografia: de Niépce a Krauss, Oganização de Alan Trachtenberg, Orfeu Negro, Lisboa, 2013, p. 202

 
"Journey with no route" is an impressive series coming from photographer João Pedro Marnoto addressing life´sfragility and the bipolarity of contemporary world. This visual narrative displays the many contradictions that plague human relationships and diverse territories in our current time, and does so in a particular way.

We are taken by the rich and complex images that make us somehow want to look at them again and again trying to capture life´s inigma: The expression of pain and terror of an ape, which arises as a metaphor for the sufferingthat man inflicts to himself and to other animals; the anonymity and loneliness of the crowd, which comes through the cut-out figures backlit and isolated buildings that compete to see who is the tallest between them: the caring and erotic view of a nude woman who reminds us a Renaissance venus; pollute natural environment, adulterated by industrial infrastructure and simultaneously appropriated by man in their leisure times; and Auge´s non-spacesor the large malls and urban spaces full of contradictory signs.

The author reveals through a set of images, which entail a great intuition, sensitivity and magic, the complexity thatattends to human existence and how economic logic, without hindrance or substantive regulation, is appropriating itself of the territory in an entropic way. A project of personal reflection, a set of meaningful memories that the author wanted to register by creating adocumentary narrative that, on one hand, allows as the author says "... to revive and recreate those memories.Where the purpose is the journey itself. As life. "On the other hand, it is a photographic series that does not limit itself as being just a record of a number of situations, people and places, but that deconstructs these places andlives by way of a very specific visual poetry of its own, and thus transcends what is specific and goes beyond life´s contingency.

Unmistakably, a very interesting photographic project that combines autobiographical and poetic elements, making a documentary series whose structure creates a musical sequence that incorporates a life and colour palette that transcends the frozen moment of each image. Thus, it meets contemporary photography with a different magic, without rejecting the decisive moment and taking as subjects humanity and difficult social conditions.

Pedro Leão Neto

HASHIMA (GUNKANJIMA)

HASHIMA (GUNKANJIMA)

BY SÉBASTIEN TIXIER

Born in 1980 in a small town in central France, Sebastien Tixier now lives and works in Paris.

Trained as an engineer, but fascinated by his father’s camera during his childhood, he finally became a self-taught independent photographer in 2007. His work ranges from staged studio photographs to landscapes and documentaries on globalisation and its impacts – culture, environment. His photographs have been awarded numerous prizes and been exhibited in festivals and galleries across Europe.

synopsis

The Japanese island of Hashima, also known as Gunkanjima (or “war vessel”) because of its shape, falls under the Nagasaki Prefecture in Japan. Used for quarrying coal, the island experienced extremely dense urbanisation accompanied by the highest population density rate ever recorded worldwide at that time. When the coal mines closed in 1974, the island watched as its inhabitants suddenly departed, leaving it to abandon and desolation. Contrary to most deserted places, the island of Hashima bears no traces of human life following its brutal abandon. No graffiti or signs of destruction wreaked by Man exist: the Hashima of today has been shaped by the elements and the passage of time alone. Picking my way among the ruins, isolated in the middle of the ocean, and the fragments of the lives of men, women and children, one are struck by the island’s silence. A meditation about the impacts of industrial decisions on the lives of many.

editor's note

Our aim is to disseminate and bring to light telling work of emergent or young photographers.

DOZEN OF BULLS

DOZEN OF BULLS

BY BERBER THEUNISSEN

Berber Theunissen (Netherlands, 1989) is graduated (Cum Laude) from the Fotoacademie in Amsterdam. For her graduation series ‘Vagabond’ she explored how one lives without a permanent home, and how it feels to wander between friends and family with few possesions. Berber chooses to capture those situations that she little grasp of. Through photography, she creates her own holdfast to view her own life more objectively. She has exhibited her work in several solo and in group exhibitions in the Netherlands, and has had work published in international magazines and websites. Works and lives in Amsterdam.

synopsis

After ‘Vagabond’ she created ‘Dozen of Bulls’ during a tour with her grandfather through Iceland. “Fall 2013 me and my granddad went to Iceland. Me 24, him 75, differentiated by 51 years of life-experience. While I was figuring out how to live my life and what choices to make. Granddad was looking back on the choices he made in life and the ‘growth’ between then and now. We had never been this close...” Berber’s work was selected by Foam as a part of the exhibition ‘Photo Town’ in Felix&Foam, as well being selected for the ‘New Dutch Photography Talent’ in Gup Gallery Amsterdam.

editor´s note

Our aim is to disseminate and bring to light telling work of emergent or young photographers.

DOLOMITES - N46 36 47 E12 9 47

DOLOMITES - N46 36 47 E12 9 47

BY ANDREA ALESSIO

Andrea Alessio (Venice, 1966) lives and works between Treviso and Venice. He studied Literature and Cinema at the Ca' Foscari University in Venice and afterwards continued studying photography with authors like Italo Zannier, Paolo Costantini, Gabriele Basilico, Jessica Backhaus, Guido Guidi, Silvia Camporesi, Joakim Eskildsen, Machiel Botman, Marco Zanta, Todd Hido, Pino Musi, Mark Steinmetz, Jason Fulford, Lucas Foglia.

His work has been exhibited, among others, by the gallery Il Diaframma for its 25th anniversary, by the Contemporary Art Museum in Bergamo and the Science Museum in Milan and more recently by private galleries in New York, San Francisco, Milano, Venice, Philadelphia, ecc. Andrea Alessio owns and runs a photographic studio (www.varianti.it). After a pause in his artistic career, he restarted focusing on more personal work in 2011.

synopsis

"ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN"

I would like to introduce this new series of photos by Andrea Alessio dedicated to the Dolomites by appealing to axiom that photography is a philosophical practice. His exercise allows us competing critically with the exotic, or with what exists outside us. It is not only a technical ability, but also a thought instrument that we can apply to the reality and to our reflection training-ground. Consequently, the true discovery is not in the visible imagination we create, but in what it reveals to us of our mind.

The journey begun during the recent years by Andrea Alessio through his own “where”, coinciding approximately with that geographic region called Veneto, satisfies first of all this need to realize, to direct the mind in such a way to perceive better what is important for us. In this sense the journey is a re-birth path that can just start nearby, from what we do not see or we do not want to see anymore. In this sense, Andrea Alessio’s choice to start the re-discovery of his own ‘territory’ through the Christmas decorations and their unsuspectable shining a light in the dark of the most common places is brilliant. His patient night visions derive from this need to shine a light on his own experiences.

The following stages of this journey lead us from the Venetian plain with its factories and scattered houses, to the most solitary mountain landscapes, in which the relationship between solids and voids, between what is and what is not, is sharper and more marked in the photography, also for the use of black and white. In the infinite snows of Misurina, collected in the ‘Apollo 19’ album, in which Andrea Alessio sketches the features of a Martian space deceiving the reason by widening the borders; then in the ‘Vajont’, where he tries his “reconstruction”, by investigating not so much for the remains of the memory as the sensations before time, before that dramatic moment, October 9th, 1963, at 10.39 PM, sweeping away almost 2,000 people during the sleep.

The photographer reminds us for a moment, that the mountain, a symbol of union between sky and earth, does not always aid the awareness by the human being of his position in the universe.

Finally the Dolomites. The story highlights another basic element of the poetic view by Andrea Alessio. The distance or what I would call more philosophically the right measure. It becomes the interpretation necessary to open the project and to explain the relationship with the context. The author looks for an optimal scale to bring the mountain closer to its possible dimensions. Somehow, you perceive the desire to hide any reference from the observer. The message is clear: the mountain does not exist, just what we are able to grasp of it exists. Of course, the façade of the Dolomite peaks is hard, compact and impenetrable. This rock is so much that it seems to us that we may have it between the teeth and chew it. However, sooner or later, the details appear on the surface. A fir challenging the high altitude, a pole driven in the stone, a child climbing on his hands. Suddenly this uniform mass starts slowly to distinguish itself, to reveal its life, as if it were a projection of our same existence. As we gain confidence, it seems to us almost that we may own it. So, it can even happen that we joke by mistaking the face of one of these Dolomites for the profile of Garibaldi, Verdi or Karl Marx. This is of little importance. What is important is the effort taking us there. In all these works you breathe a great ground silence, necessary to think and to obtain suggestions from the inner whispers. It seems to me that Andrea Alessio has stopped to pursue the past. All his meetings with his “where” gives shape to a new personal interpretation. Light, space and time are words that the author makes vibrate to call the definition into question and to look for a meaning out of the pure objectivity. Now there is nothing we can do but wait for his descent from the mountain towards the sea.

Steve Bisson (Asolo, October 13, 2014)

CÁ ENTRE NÓS

CÁ ENTRE NÓS

BY JOSÉ SILVA PINTO

José Silva Pinto is an Angolan photographer with a scientific background, whose life leads him initially to work in various areas, but who, at some point, devoted himself entirely to his passion: photography.

A recognised author who has been published in the most prestigious institutional publications of its country, he already has several exhibitions, both in Angola and abroad. His curriculum lists various photography exhibitions, as "Olhares" held in 2003 at the Casino do Hotel Marinha, in Luanda;  “Deambulações" in 2004, at Bar Pub Desigual, in Luanda; "Meet the arts of Angola" in 2005, at the Embassy of Angola in Tokyo, Japan; " Dipanda forever" in 2006, in the collective exhibition of Luanda Triennale and the solo exhibition in Seoul , South Korea, in 2007, at the invitation of a representative office of Angola.

It is significant to refer his latest publication – Cá Entre Nós José Silva Pinto - a book describing all the journey of the photographer, from the province of Cabinda to Namibe, Cunene and Cuando - Cubango, showing the locations from north to south of Angola that José Silva Pinto travelled between 2005 and 2011.

The photographic work of Jose Silva Pinto gives us a perspective that differs considerably from the stereotyped imagery of Angola, thus helps to create a more comprehensive idea about this great country of the African continent. His images allow a deeper analysis about Angola since they communicate, through the different situations and spaces portrayed, “another look” and understanding, showing to us also the positive human aspects, which are common to all cultures and people.

Jose Silva Pinto wholehearted and single out viewpoint about his country, and the genuine way he captures emotions and moments of life, immediately conquer our interest. The documentary and personal nature of his work is the result of the ability of Jose Silva Pinto to relate authentically with Angola and its people, thus enabling him, as he says, to be more constructive and more participatory in his work, but at the same time to draw attention to the problems we all have a responsibility not to ignore.

This work will be shown over the coming months, simulating the sensation of travel and discovery, intended by the author.

1st stage: Discovering Cunene, Cuando-Cubango and Bié.

Written by Pedro Leão Neto

ANGOLA - STREET VIEWS

ANGOLA - STREET VIEWS

BY GRAEME WILLIAMS

My work is housed in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian (USA) and Duke University (USA), The South African National Gallery and The University of Cape Town.

I have staged solo exhibitions in Johannesburg, New York, London and Paris and have contributed to many combined exhibitions on contemporary South African photography; including the 2011 Figures and Fictions exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the 2014 Apartheid and After exhibition at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam.

During 2013 I was awarded the POPCAP Prize for Contemporary African Photography as well as the Ernest Cole Book Award.

URL
https://graemewilliams.co.za/

Synopsis

Google Street View has become one of the most utilized sources of visual information and documentation in current day life. A mechanical camera records views of our planet’s streets at random moments in time. The views are snapped as they happen, with no consideration, for instance, of aesthetics or historical significance. Furthermore, the presence or absence of people within the frame is irrelevant. Google Street View provides us with a largely non-subjective document of our global village.

Doug Richard in his 2012 book, A New American Picture, makes a powerful statement about economic disparities and the neglect of certain segments of American society. His careful selection of screen fragments from the constant stream of dispassionate street views, produced a stark view of the social contrasts within his country. Richard’s anti-decisive moments are especially poignant because of the knowledge that the original source of these images (the Google camera), is both mechanical and perfunctory. His brilliant selection, in contrast, is extremely personal and subjective – the combination a creative and powerful comment on image-making and the state of his nation.

Angola, a large country on the south-west coast of Africa, also has vast disparities in wealth, but in contrast to America the majority of the population live in a state of dire poverty. Google has only captured a few streets within the richest waterfront areas of Luanda, the capital city. The sprawling slums remain undocumented. The lack of street view coverage of particular areas of the world highlights the degree to which social and economic disparities occur on a global scale; the Google street view coverage is influenced by the potential number of online users.

This essay, Angola: Street Views explores one of the overlooked corners of the world. Employing the pared-down aesthetic of the automated street camera as well as chance juxtapositions captured in Rickard’s book, these drive-by snapshots provide inescapable facts and insights into the neglected lives of many Angolans. The photographs were taken from a moving vehicle, resulting in accidental associations of people, vehicles and landscapes. The unstructured approach and loose framing results in images that resemble Google street views, however they lack any online functionality. Rather, their bland appearance, devoid of any postcard-type aesthetic, serves to communicate and amplify the social and economic poverty that pervades the city.

Images’ captions:
Angola – Street Views