OCCIDENTE NUEVO

 

OCCIDENTE NUEVO

BY ANTHONY MARCHETTI

 

Anthony Marchetti is a Minnesota photographer and photography instructor whose work focuses on how people interact with their urban spaces. Marchetti completed a BA at Gustavus Adolphus College and an MFA at the University of Minnesota. Currently, he is an Art Institutes International Minnesota full-time faculty member and also serves as adjunct photography instructor at both the University of Minnesota and Anoka-Ramsey Community College.

 

synopsis

San Ysidro, southern-most city in San Diego County on the U.S./Mexican border, hosts the world’s busiest land border crossing. At this site, Tijuana receives and recycles San Diego’s discarded architectural waste, re-using and reconstructing materials into unique structures that offer new opportunities for living and working. This photographic project focuses on this cross-border transmigration of building materials and small suburban homes from San Diego to Tijuana. Although located only 20 miles apart, few cities could be more different. San Diego calls itself “America’s finest city,” boasting some of the country’s wealthiest subdivisions, while Tijuana is viewed as decadent, transient and poor (as UCSD architecture professor Teddy Cruz describes it, “a contemporary Sodom and Gomorrah”). As building materials and small homes find their place amidst existing Tijuana neighborhoods, other transported homes are springing up in undeveloped outskirts surrounded by open desert or ringed by sparsely populated squatter communities. While these Tijuana images share affinities with Robert Adams’s mid-1970s work The New West, presenting newly developed tract homes against a barren western landscape, they also offer important differences. Adams documented the human imprint on the American landscape – a stark, expansive natural world, flattened and manicured to make room for tidy boxes providing practical living space, yet seemingly devoid of aesthetic.

This project departs significantly from Adams in both intent and result. Adams’s images reveal the driving force of American commerce and expansion as residential developers cleared huge swaths of land to make room for entire neighborhoods. Growth at Tijuana’s edge is slower, seemingly more haphazard or at least devoid of a master plan. Instead, these images of small homes reveal individual desires to carve out personal space from a crowded urban center. They exemplify serendipity and intention, cultural originality and assimilation. As Tijuana grows and pushes at its less populated perimeter, development will fill the open spaces surrounding these transported homes.

San Diego’s architectural refuse and discarded small homes represent new opportunities for low-income Mexican residents, and the project documents the cultural influences and ingenuity of grass-roots construction through re-use. By examining this process of transmigration, assimilation, and transition, I hope to reveal more about how people build, deconstruct, and reconstruct spaces in which they live and work, and how culture, expediency, and financial resources influence what is considered trash or treasure, waste or opportunity.

 

Editor´s note

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

 

NAMIKAKE

 

NAMIKAKE

BY ARITO NISHIKI

 

"By southern coastline of Niigata City is located in northern part of the Sea of Japan. A village sank into the sea by a coastal erosion called "Namikake" in their region. In the darkness of night on this coast, it takes a long time to adjust my vision. Once my eyes get used to it, images of a big rock, trees, a lighthouse, snow and the sea jump into my vision. The images have been there in the darkness, but they suddenly appeared to me. The landscape seems that it hasn't been there before and appeared in that moment I shoot. The coastal erosion that occurs in this region repeatedly changes their landscape each time.It is not the demise that one disappears by erosion, but it is the origin that the other is newly born.Every flash I make in the darkness, new form is born.
While I am at this place, I was feeling ambiguity between existence and creation, and reality and fantasy. It symbolizes that this coast is unstable forever by erosion. "Namikake" series are based on my these feelings in the coast of the snowy winter."

More images of the project  click

 

About the author

Arito Nishiki

Born in Akita, Japan in 1981.

Graduated from Tokyo College of Photography.

Lives and works in Tokyo.

 

Solo Exhibitions

2014. Meguro Museum of Art “NamiKake(Makuridashi)”(Tokyo)

2014. Gallery The White, “ NamiKake and Makuridashi”(Tokyo)  

 

Group Exhibitions

2017. LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017 exhibition at Voies Off Festival (Arles, France)

2016. Gallery The White,「The Ordinary 」(Tokyo)

2015. Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale(Niigata)

2015. The 12th 「1_WALL」Photography Exhibition (Tokyo)   【Award】

2018.The Independent Photographer Competition Landscape finalist

2017.LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017, Finalist

2015.The 12th 「1_WALL」Photography Exhibition finalist

2012.Japan Professional Photographers Society Exhibition JPS Yang Eye Award
 

website : https://www.aritonishiki.com

 

MY RIVER

 

MY RIVER

BY GIANPAOLO ARENA


Gianpaolo Arena, architect and photographer, develops research projects on social and documentary themes and environmental issues. The interest in architectural representation has oriented his attention towards architectural photography, urban landscape, the use of photography as a survey of the anthropized territory and towards relations of multiple identities that belongs and characterizes places and people. An important part of his photographic research is developed on modified landscapes in different companies, industrial sites and in the business world. Since 2010, he is editor of a magazine on international contemporary photography called:  “Landscape Stories” with which he coordinates photographic campaigns in the territory, workshops (Massimo Siragusa, Bruno Ceschel-SP, BH, Raimond Wouda, Valerio Spada, Francesco Jodice, Simon Roberts, Vincenzo Castella, Tre Terzi), editorial (Adolescence book, Gianluca Perrone “Balere”, Joël Tettamanti “Works 2001-2019” for BENTELI Verlag!) and exhibition projects (Photissima Festival Torino, 2012, Sifest 2014, 21er Haus, Vienna, 2014). Since 2013 he is the curator of the project “CALAMITA / À”, a platform of investigations and researches on the territories in Vajont. His project “My Vietnam” was presented at the photographic festival “ F4_an idea of photography” in Villa Brandolini, Pieve di Soligo TV in 2013 and during 2014 at the” Photography Festival” in Padova, at Galleria Anteprima d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome and at Fotografia Festival di Roma. In 2013 he participated at the “The 10th Sao Paulo Architecture Biennale”, Brazil with “Latitude Platform” organization. In 2015 he take part of the jury of Melbourne ‘Photobook Award’ and of ‘On Landscape Project’, Matèria in Rome. Teacher of Bitume residency.

synopsis

A resurgent river that winds for about 100 kilometres, shaping springs, little lakes, marshy areas, peat-bogs. The main features of this river and lagoon territory often remain indistinct. The space is not only the background of an action but it often becomes the main character. The perception of it seems confused, indistinct and the limits of the visible become more noticeable. The river is repeatedly the object of other eyes, often the object turns into subject. The observer becomes landscape and vice versa. The eyes and the points of view multiply: landscapes only apparently deserted, landscapes not visible, but insistently visible, landscapes immersed in the fog where there is not a living soul to be seen but thousands of presences are heard. What we don’t see is always more important than what we see. No place looks like that place, every place is that place.

editor's note

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

 

MIGHTY MOUNTAINS

 

MIGHTY MOUNTAINS

BY CHARLES ROUX 

Charles Roux has a European Bachelor of Photography. He attended the Paris school Icart Photo, and was graduated as “head of the year” as well as “best end-of-studies portfolio”. 

This emerging photographer is deeply inspired by literature, by his own experiences, emotions and yearning for creation. Whatever the subject or the purpose may be, he is striving to create above all atmospheres and underlying stories. As he says: “I might be a daydreamer, led by the mingling of my emotions and the spaces or people all around“. 

synopsis

The blue hour is the time of the awkard encouter of the rising moon and the setting sun, the time when the patterns and the loftiness of the mountains are enhanced by the blue light of dusk. A short-lived overlapping of lights and timelessness reduces the observer to a mere witness of sheer serenity. All the air fills with cold and silence.

Everything is covered in bluish snow, making the vastness all the more uniform and effective.

My gaze has been as somber as soothing across immensity, and frozen, we feel like there is no other way than just contemplation, as feelings are temporarily trapped, scowling at their own uselessness, the emotion was muffling around itslef, as if to imitate the lack of time and the perfect steadiness of ice.


Editor´s note

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