William Mark Sommer

William Mark Sommer

Dana Stirling

Established View | In creating Established View, I want to confront the way the National Parks are experienced from the scenic drives to the curated viewpoints that made these natural wonders memorable. I became fascinated with the way these landmarks were being utilized from the experienced hiker to the weekend tourist waiting in line for the next selfie. By observing this modern culture that comes to inhabit the parks I seek to discover how long is a moment to these travelers. By utilizing multiple frames of film I seek to explore this movement of time within a place to better understand how this moment of discovery becomes memorable. www.williammarksommer.com

Jussi Puikkonen

Jussi Puikkonen

Dana Stirling

Afterparty | Jussi Puikkonen’s Afterparty explores human traces in a landscape. His works focus on a carnival landscape and what happens to it after a celebration. The images show the signs of joy and getting together before the cleaners arrive. The series includes photographs from different festivals, public events, anniversaries and house parties in Finland, the UK, Netherlands, Spain, Mexico and France. The works depict the moments after people have left the venue, leaving behind trash, decorations and tents as well as wear and tear on the environment.

 I didn’t take part in any of the events featured in the exhibition, but some of them did disturb my sleep. As a child, I found it fascinating to be the first one up in the morning after knowing that my parents had held a party. Our home looked different when it was full of dishes, bottles, leftovers, decorations and unfamiliar smells. I was so young that I was sleeping during the parties. Grown-up parties were something mysterious and I was only able to hear the buzz of conversation and see the mess in the morning. It was fascinating to imagine who had been at the party and what had happened. Through this project I have returned to that moment after a party, a moment familiar from my childhood.

Human traces raise questions as to what has happened in a certain place, giving rise to thought-provoking, imaginary stories. The traces left on the landscape are a concrete sign that something special happened right before the photo was taken, although in reality special things have happened in the same place for centuries. The photos are proof, based on which one’s imagination builds a story.

Jussi Puikkonen (b. 1980) is an Amsterdam-based photographer. He graduated from the Lahti Institute of Design in 2007 and since then has actively displayed his works at solo and group exhibitions. His previous solo exhibition, Sauna Folk, toured in Helsinki, Kaunas, Rotterdam and Budapest. His works have been on display as part of group exhibitions, for example, at Santral Istanbul, Dortmunder U, Vienna Künstlerhaus and the Finnish Museum of Photography. His works are included in the collections of FOAM Amsterdam. Edition Patrick Frey has published Puikkonen’s photography book On Vacation. www.jussipuikkonen.com

Lotta Lemetti

Lotta Lemetti

Dana Stirling

The Ordinary | For me creating still life compositions is a form of self-exploration. The creating process is an intriguing and almost devotional journey through my mind. Through predilections in aesthetical decisions such as subject matter, color and composition the work reflects who I am, where I come from, what I’ve experienced and what I want to pursue.

I am fascinated by how much beauty exists in an ordinary thing such as a piece of toast, if looked at it in a certain way. The proverb ”There is beauty in everything, just not everybody sees it”, is being illustrated throughout this series of still lives. Nothing is too insignificant or ordinary, that there wouldn’t be beauty in it.

To me, the process of creating these images was as important as the end result. Starting with a blank white table, as an empty canvas, I started creating shapes and forms exploring them and appreciating the beauty of my subject’s unique qualities. Slowly shapes transformed into arrangements. I had a picture in my head of a certain feature of an item I was photographing, revealing that quality became my starting point and a core of the finalized image.

The fundamentals of my photographic work: the use of light, color and and empty space are distinctly present in this series, as well as my desire for simplicity and lightness. I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration for my work from Laura Letinsky’s and Wolfgang Tillmans’ still lives.

With the series The Ordinary I want the viewer to share my sense of wonder and joy in the ordinary objects of everyday life. I want to give the audience a moment to appreciate the things we so often take for granted and overlook. I wish to encourage people to slow down from the hecticness of life to a more tranquil pace in which they are able to fully observe and receive the beauty and peculiarity of this miraculous world we live in. www.lottalemetti.com

Joan Lobis Brown

Joan Lobis Brown

Dana Stirling

Phantasmagorica | “Phantasmagorical” is the title of my photo series in which I merged reflections from the exterior with the interior and created my own fantasyland.

I purposely crafted a world in which reality is overtaken by imagination. In my world, birds perch on coffee cups and fly free around my kitchen. Human beings, still central and recognizable in my fantasyland, take on new shapes and dimensions, sometimes friendly, sometimes menacing. The boundary between the objects in the home and the flora and fauna in the garden is blurred. This is a world where magic emerges from the images, where it is a joy to observe and live.

As the project continued, I realized this is not simply whimsical and illusory; the photographs could also be viewed metaphorically. “Phantasmagorical” represents the dichotomy of what we as humans present to the world, and what we as individuals keep hidden internally– that which is our own unique true selves. It alludes to the split between what people are feeling on the inside and the mask people put on in their everyday lives. It symbolizes our collective public face and our secret realities. This is our human condition.

I took these images exactly as I saw them through my camera’s viewfinder. Each image represents the "rush" that I feel when capture what I want to feel in the face of what actually exists. www.joanlobisbrown.com

Nastya Fedkina

Nastya Fedkina

Dana Stirling

I want the viewer to feel the mood of my photographs, while looking at them. Color with light together help me create the atmosphere in the frame. With the help of color, I want to share with what eyes I look at this world. Light only helps to the open up the given idea. I like to search for quiet and mysterious locations for my future work. Sometimes, I appear spontaneously in such places. I think the most important part of my work is to share my vision with people and to try turning their attention to the environment. Every day we don’t notice how beautiful this place can be that we just pass by. One has only to stop and look from the different point of view.

Marinos Tsagkarakis

Marinos Tsagkarakis

Dana Stirling

Wild Goose Chase | Under what criteria can we define absurdity? Is "common sense" the perfect reference for recognizing the meaningful, and the rational?

I grew up under the common western norms of what is reasonable. Actually, I followed all the "right" steps that lead safely to a successful and happy life. I received a good education, I found a respected job, I got a nice house and a fancy car...Actually, I did all the "correct" things that lead safely to a successful and happy life.

Looking back, the last time I felt excited and genuinely happy about something was during my childhood; with my vivid imagination, I was constantly experimenting, tasting, feeling the world around me.
This amazing feeling came back in my adult life only when I started being interested in the absurd; chasing objects, and life scenes that make no practical sense; events and facts that you doubt about their existence.


In a world full of rationalism and ubiquitous political correctness, these small spikes of confusion may be the key for subverting the absurd into something substantial, and fascinating. www.marinostsagkarakis.com

karen Navarro

karen Navarro

Dana Stirling

EL PERTENECER EN TIEMPOS MODERNOS (Belonging in Modern Times) | explores the online self-representation used as a venue to create a sense of belongingness. Humans are innately driven to attain a sense of belonging. Just like water or shelter the sense of belonging is a human need. In modern times, as this phenomenon has transcended from the physical to the digital, social media platforms function as sites to congregate and connect.

Every day, an average of 93 million selfies are being taken all over the world with many of them being posted online. In El Pertenecer en Tiempos Modernos (Belonging in Modern Times) (2019), I use Instagram to explore the ways in which people use social media as a platform to project an assimilated version of themselves.

Inspired by cubism and the representation of the subject through the investigation of materiality and collages, I have reassembled the portraits depicting a distorted image that speaks about the constructed identities we perform on social media.

The individuals photographed were selected by an open call on Instagram and were asked to wear a specific

color clothing. The use of a specific color and the way they are all posed, are a way to equalize the individuals in each group. Using technologies of today such as 3-D printing and laser cutting was essential in my process of addressing contemporary media. The photographs were embossed with the top hundred hashtags on Instagram. Digital culture has changed and continues to change the ways we behave, relate and connect to each other. The tridimensional collages suggest multiple layers of meaning and aim to discuss the challenges of being authentic and real in a time of obsession over portraying an online illusion of ourselves. www.karennavarroph.com

Isabelle Pateer

Isabelle Pateer

Dana Stirling

UNSETTLED | Unsettled is a project on change. The series focuses on the impact of yielding capitalistic and political power on people and their environment. A global story, approached by focusing on a local example: the expanding harbour of Antwerp (Europe’s second largest port) and related nature compensation plans imposed by the European Union. A contemporary project showing the local effects of our shifting global economy and increasing import of overseas goods on people and their environment.

The series shows portraits of young inhabitants alternated by interior images and landscapes which bare witness to the transformed state of the area, either for industrial or (compensating man made) ‘new nature’ targets. The project questions notions as change, progress, value of land, migration, (manmade) nature, the power of money and the connection between identity and surrounding.

The series was started in 2007 and received International acclaim through several awards, publications and exhibitions. www.isabellepateer.com

Joaquin Palting

Joaquin Palting

Dana Stirling

Last Days | We live in an era of frightening superlatives. Each morning the headlines blare, “July HOTTEST Month Ever Recorded”, “Climate The GREATEST Existential Threat We Have Faced”, and on and on. The warnings seem to come faster and faster falling on ears that seem to become deafer and deafer.

Last Days documents a small area of land, near Ventura, California , which was ravaged by the largest wildfire in the history of the state. The photographs foreshadow the near future that waits us as we move through the waning years of the Anthropocene. www.joaquinpalting.com

Susana Quevedo

Susana Quevedo

Dana Stirling

There’s something quieter than sleep | This series comprises several self-portraits I made over the past few years. This obsessive need to turn the camera to myself became the only way to cope with the fear of disappearance and the ever-changing nature of my body riddled with vulnerability, as if it were a disease caused by the accumulation of time, fear, and memories.
Adding several layers of black charcoal to cover up the printed area of the photographic image, made it seem like it was fading to complete blackness; I then used a flat brush to remove the excessive amount of charcoal in order to make possible to get a glimpse of the photograph hidden beneath this black surface. One looks at these blackened photographs as if they were in the realm of memory invocation: memories are dark and distant as if they somehow inhabited the core of blackened soil.
This is a project about not wanting to be seen and choosing how not to be seen, an act of self-erasure. It is also about how the spectator looks at these images, it’s a way of playing with the gaze of the spectator. These images require you look at them with full attention and time, but simultaneously you’re unable to see the photograph clearly. You will get a glimpse of the subtle lines of my face or my hands, of the obscured shape of my petrified body.
Something you cannot see completely, something still and quiet, like the darkness inside the body, like the body asleep in the dark. www.cargocollective.com/susanaquevedo

David Johnson

David Johnson

Dana Stirling

Wig Heavier Than a Boot | Wig Heavier Than a Boot brings together photography by David Johnson and poetry by Philip Matthews. Revealing Petal—a drag consciousness as whom Philip manifests to write, and David photographs—the project crosses art-making rituals with isolated performances within domestic spaces and pastoral landscapes. Taken together, the resulting photographs and poems reveal dynamic relationships between author, character, and observer. By articulating a specific creative process in which one identity becomes two, the project in turn opens up a conversation about gender expression through an art-historical lens.

The photographs provide one record of author and character, blurring art-historical masculine and feminine postures and gestures. The poems provide another, which elaborate upon the lived experience of being, modeling, and sometimes, obscuring Petal. Subverting the ekphrastic literary tradition, Philip’s poems do not respond to Johnson’s photographs, nor vice-versa. Both forms are made in the present: as David directs the shoot, Philip makes performance notes that give way to the poem. The durational mode of writing parallels the time it takes to prepare for a photograph, while the sudden capture sheds light on the burst of line that yields a poem. In this process, David and Philip continually break open and leverage their own biases and desires to create an authentic body of work. 

Petal is alternately present and not, like a nonphysical entity invoked by a medium. The photographs capture the blend or distinction between Philip and Petal, and the poems hybridize their perspectives, enacting a relationship that is surreal, empowering, and unbearable, as the project title suggests. What is constant is a sense of a person wanting to belong to the place that hosts them (i.e. farmland in rural Wisconsin, the coast of North Carolina, an art museum in St. Louis, a small church), even or especially when the social norms of that place are felt to ostracize them. Both photographs and poems balance narrative with fragmentation and invite multiple interpretations. www.davidjohnsonstudio.com

Neal Johnson

Neal Johnson

Dana Stirling

Landforms | is a study of Iceland’s geothermal extraction infrastructure and its relation to the natural landscape in which it exists. The way in which the structures have been designed, whether intentionally or coincidentally, have a mass and a volume and an aesthetic that echo the natural landforms around them. These photographs explore how natural landforms and manmade landforms coexist in this unique environment while still maintaining an egalitarian and harmonious relationship towards each other. Using a 6x7 medium format camera to achieve optimal clarity and resolution for this process, Neal has been photographing Iceland for the past two years, examining this infrastructure and its relationship to the natural world. www.nealparkerjohnson.com

shesaidred

shesaidred

Dana Stirling

Mood, Memory, or Myth | My ongoing series Mood, Memory, or Myth is an exploration of the human experiences and memories of fear, anxiety, and pleasure, and the impact of growing up in a family that refuses to discuss any of that. Sex, sadness, death, and family illnesses are subjects that my family considers taboo. My family's inability to discuss these subjects openly left me without a voice. I discovered that the simple act of photographically depicting these forbidden subjects empowers me, allowing me to explore my feminine desires, my sadnesses, and to come to terms with my Mexican culture's and family's expectations of me as a female: to wed and have children. I create illusions that conjure the realms of the imagination without presenting a factual reality. Something very personal and complex, but which allows viewers to relate freely on their own terms. I use these subjects and memories to help me navigate the anxieties caused by my family’s expectations of me as a woman, and to fill the space left by my family’s silence on these taboos.

I work traditionally, shooting film, Polaroids, paper negatives, and making darkroom chromogenic prints, occasionally incorporating mixed media. Analog production allows me to insert more of myself into each print. www.shesaidred.com

Dotan Saguy

Dotan Saguy

Dana Stirling

Venice Beach | In a city inspired by Hollywood’s excesses keeping racial, ethnic and socioeconomic differences under a tight lid, the Palm tree lined Venice Beach boardwalk is an oasis of spontaneity, diversity, and bohemian lifestyle where weirdness is encouraged and the moment is all there is.
I’ve been irresistibly attracted yet intimidated by Venice Beach ever since I moved to Los Angeles from New York in 2003. After all, this “Coney Island of the West” as some used to call it is nothing less than the birthplace of the worldwide fitness movement and modern skateboarding, also greatly influential to the world of rock music, surfing and street art.


My images immortalize decisive moments of Venice Beach’s quirky sub-cultures using complex multi-layered compositions. The choice of high-contrast black and white, unusual angles and back-light infuse the images with an edgy yet dreamlike quality that “feel” like Venice Beach to me. I aim to the place the viewer at the center of Venice’s edgy, eccentric but endangered culture, now quickly being eroded by gentrification and corporate appropriation. https://www.dotansaguy.comwww.dotansaguy.com

Stephan Jahanshahi

Stephan Jahanshahi

Dana Stirling

Domestic Interior | In November 2018 I got hurt at work. I’ve always carried the majority of my identity in the things I do; playing rugby, working manual labor, taking photographs. That all came to a screeching halt and was replaced by nerve pain, inertia, and insomnia while I waited for Washington State to process my medical claim and put me on a path to eventual surgery in the hope of getting my life back.

I don’t move around enough in the day to get tired by night, so most evenings my wife goes to bed alone. These images are for her, while we both wait for me to come back to a normal life. www.stephanjahanshahi.com

Heather Binns

Heather Binns

Dana Stirling

Visiting the Brazzales | Moving to Portland, Oregon from Michigan almost 20 years ago was a leap of faith.

I had no job, no family, and no friends. Still, Portland felt right. Years after moving I discovered a family connection to the city through my maternal great-grandparents, Daniel and Marguerite Brazzale. They moved to Portland in the early 1940s and died in the city I now call home.

My great-grandparents are entombed in the Portland Memorial Mausoleum; a behemoth of a historical structure covering over 4 acres, spanning 8 floors and over 4 miles of corridors. 75,000 memorials in the form of bodies and cremated remains are interred in the Portland Memorial Mausoleum, and it was here that I went to discover more about the lives and deaths of my Portland roots; the Brazzales.

Over the past several years, I’ve visited the Mausoleum and the Brazzales numerous times. I am fascinated by the structure itself and by the emotions it stirs. I am intrigued by the way the structure mirrors American views on death and dying; mausoleums are a seemingly extreme attempt to stop the natural processes of decay. Granite tombs, sealed tightly against the years encased in a structure of steel and concrete thought to be so impervious that the Mausoleum was WWII bomb shelter. All of this, for what? For who?

In my visits to the Mausoleum I found myself drawn to the dichotomy of home like qualities of the spaces and the irony of entombment that has, across the decades, fallen into disrepair. The spaces are lavishly furnished, but with timeworn and decaying pieces. The sense of reverence is palpable, yet in all my visits, I only saw one person tending to a memorial.    Through my images, I hope to capture vignettes of melancholic beauty that speak to memory and the unknown stories of family. www.heatherbinns.net

Lee Nelson

Lee Nelson

Dana Stirling

Thirty-Six Views Of Mt. Lee and The Hollywood Sign | In the early 1800s Hokusai created “36 Views of Mount Fuji”, a series of woodblock prints of Mount Fuji, a powerful icon in Japan. The series depicts Mt. Fuji in different seasons and from many different vantage points and distances, in some prints Mt. Fuji dominates the scene and in some is a small part of the composition. Many of Hokusai’s prints juxtapose scenes of varied aspects of daily life with this powerful symbol. This power is derived not only from the graphic elements of Mt. Fuji’s physical presence but each viewer’s personal idea of what Mt. Fuji represents.

When photographing in the Los Angeles area I noticed that I was including the Hollywood Sign in images if it was in sight. When I thought about what attracted me to it I remembered Hokusai's series and how the power of his icon charged his prints.

For many the Hollywood Sign is instantly recognizable and that recognition locates an image in geography as well as implies some meaning based on the viewers assumptions of what Hollywood represents in the past and in the present. In his book “The Hollywood Sign” Leo Braudy writes, “But the Hollywood Sign still delivers, perhaps because it can be commandeered by everyone with a camera to mean what they want it to mean. Because it’s not a billboard, not flat, it’s shape is more elusive, with letters set at odd angles to each other. How you capture it in memory or on film is always a personal choice. For anyone climbing or driving the hills of Hollywood to seek the best road to the sign or the right angle on it, the sign situates you in your own experience. To photograph it or see it enhances your sense of self like seeing a movie star. Unlike fixed icons that may be viewed from different angles but don’t really change that much, the sign is a shifting icon whose viewers supply the context, framing themselves and the sign at once.” leesnelson.com

Epiphany Knedler

Epiphany Knedler

Dana Stirling

Adaptations | adaptations is a self-portrait reflecting on changes in my personal life. On top of the changes within my family, I moved 1,400 miles away from my hometown, where I had lived for the past twenty-two years. This exterior change left me with interior feelings to wrestle with. Using childhood photos from a family vacation in South Dakota, there is a focus on memory and nostalgia.

I sent postcards to myself, indicating a personal move across the country. I used matte material and wax to both secure and obscure the memory of my family before the changes. These artifacts are meant to be held and experienced, evoking melancholy. www.epiphanyknedler.com

Peter Boersma

Peter Boersma

Dana Stirling

Nieuwe Landschappen | I Morphe Mountains. Old images of mountain ranges, portraits of Che Guevara or Marilyn Monroe, photos of clouds, dresses, cars: Using my unique technique, I turn it into fictitious mountain landscapes.

I made my first collage with tape and paper in 1999. I think I've been using adhesive tape for more than ten kilometres ever since. I prefer to work with worn-out magazines, sometimes more than a century old. After both abstract and figurative periods, I now concentrate on a specific theme: mountains. Everything is possible in a mountain landscape. Weather, light, soil types, vegetation: walking through the mountains a continuous spectacle of shadows, lines and colours takes place before your eyes. Even in a collage everything is possible'.

I started by making collages of mountains based on old photographs of existing mountain ranges. New landscapes were created by combining shreds of photographs of the Dolomites and the Himalayas, for example. In the meantime I have set myself the challenge of creating mountain landscapes with completely different images as a source. Glaciers arise from white surfaces in magazines, ridges from the hairs of portrayed persons, lakes from flinters of blue paper. Everything and everyone can become a mountain'. www.hehallo.nl

Alan Ostreicher

Alan Ostreicher

Dana Stirling

Apartment 304 | These photographs are from an ongoing series of snapshots taken in and around my wife's and my apartment with a Polaroid camera and instant film over many years. I've had the idea of making images of my immediate domestic, day to day environment ever since spending a summer during college living in the Boston expressionist painter Jason Berger's art filled apartment in Brookline. He painted mainly landscapes but I had a special affinity for the work he produced in his apartment. I was amazed at how his unique way of seeing transformed the space in which I was living into abstract, playful, and frenzied lines of color and space. Robert Bechtel is another artist whose use of everyday domestic scenes in his work has influenced my approach to this project.

We've lived in this rent controlled apartment for over 20 years and although the rent is very reasonable we sometimes think about moving.

The thought of living somewhere else is a poignant reminder that although we've spent a good part of our lives here it may, at some point, be just a memory. I've made a lot of pictures of physical details of our apartment over the years, but the series mainly consists of those that depict the quiet moments of little consequence that comprise most of our time. www.alanostreicher.com

Load More