The Era of Hopeful Monsters | Our environment as it appears to us in photographs is translated as landscape, a landscape that is transformed, altered and romanticized by American culture. Despite a desire for the unspoiled ideal of the American landscape that prompted the founding of the National Park system, our human need to organize, facilitate and take ownership, has become the geographical reality.
House/hold "The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children." — G.K. Chesterton
Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s work reinterprets the people, activities and objects of their everyday life as they navigate perceptions of identity, heroism and family within a uniquely American subjectivity. In the photographic series House/hold, the artists take a heroic look at their ordinary day-to-day lives through self-portraits of themselves and children. The titles come from Shakespeare and mythology such as Ophelia, Hercules and Diana.
Inside the frames are described places and events that have characterized the life and travel of Giovanni dalla Costa: the places of birth, the war of independence with the nascent Kingdom of Italy, the great emigration to the Americas and Alaska, the search for gold, the return to home and the 1st world war with some hints on European and Italian contemporary immigration. The storytelling will try to tell the story of a farmer, who became a gold digger. He passed all the major crises between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the awareness that "history and memory are not synonymous. Memory is life carried by living groups and therefore in permanent evolution. History is instead the problematic and incomplete reconstruction of what is no longer ". -Pierre Nora
Arrivals in Cesenatico and discover what it means void. The greyness of winter. The cold beauty. The appearance of observing wonders abandoned. These photos are devoid of human being, but full of humanity into hibernation. The viewer’s attention is focused solely on the structures, unique and unmistakable. They waited too long gaze of a stranger, to receive proper attention.
HERBARIUM | When I think of my childhood I remember that when I was alone I saw the world different. I enjoyed walking to school, observing houses and thinking about other people lives, looking for figure shapes in rocks, stopping around gardens and counting flowers, thinking of how long the snail trails on the sidewalk are.
Will revery alone really do if bees are few? As much as I love to daydream, I’m afraid the answer is a resounding, gut-wrenching ‘NO’. Bees are crucial to the continuation of human life. But our impact on the environment through the misuse of insecticides, added to the proliferation of pests and diseases and loss of habitat, is threatening the survival of this mighty insect. When bees have access to good nutrition, so do we – you can thank them for one in three bites of food you eat – and yet every batch of pollen has at least six pesticides in it.
Borca di Cadore is a small town in the province of Belluno, in the region called Cadore, in the north-east of Italy. The village is located in the middle of the Boite river valley, at 942mt above sea level close to the Dolomites and just below Mount Antelao, along the road that leads to the famous village of Cortina d'Ampezzo, then continuing towards Germany.
Breaking Tradition is a series of medium format film photographs spanning a period of 5 years during the time I lived in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, Canada. These images attempt to explore a sincere appreciation of the landscape while taking into consideration what is expected and maintained aesthetically within a tourism-focused seaside environment.
