portfolios — FLOAT

Aug 13

Aug 13 Rashod Taylor

Little Black Boy | My work addresses themes of race, culture, family, and Legacy and these images are a kind of family album, filled with friends and family, birthdays, vacations, and everyday life. At the same time, these images tell you more than my family story; they’re a window onto the Black American experience. As I document my son I am interested in examining his childhood and the world he navigates. At the same time these images show my own unspoken anxiety and fragility as it pertains to the wellbeing of my son and fatherhood.

At times I worry if he will be ok as he goes to school or as he plays outside with friends as children do. These feelings are enhanced due to the realities of growing up black in America. He can't live a carefree childhood as he deserves; there is a weight that comes with his blackness, a weight that he is not ready to bear. It's my job to bear this weight as I am accustomed to the sorrows and responsibility it brings, the weight of injustice, prejudices, and racism that has been interwoven in our society and institutional systems for hundreds of years. I help him through this journey of childhood as I hope one day this weight will be lifted. www.rashodtaylor.com

Alyssa Leigh Thorn

Aug 12

Aug 12 Alyssa Leigh Thorn

Through Time and Thorns |

If I close my eyes, I still feel you here
You are the blueberry jam sky at 9 pm
You are the clouds that tell me to breathe
The rainbow in the sun storm
A Peter Paul and Mary vinyl at the antique shop
You are the clock every day at 3:33
I hear you in the crack of a crab shell
When a boat engine turns over
And the buzzing of a bee
I feel you when the sun hits the sea and reflects back onto me When I'm underwater and the waves roll over my head
If I close my eyes, you’re right here with me
You are everywhere

Through Time and Thorns started as a healing process; coming to terms with the loss of our Patriarch, my Pop Pop. I connected to the items and pieces of him I had left, as well as the family he built around me. Looking through the items my grandpa has kept over his years showed me the roots of our synchronicities and in our family. It turned into an exploration of self identity vs family identity, and aided in my grieving process. Losing him uprooted my life, and shined light upon our collective memories. Losing him showed me the cyclical nature of the human experience. www.alyssaleighthorn.com

Leonardo Magrelli

Aug 11

Aug 11 Leonardo Magrelli

Paradise | Paradise - from ancient persian Pairidaeza (Pairi - around, Daeza - wall) a place surrounded by walls. Iran has recently been included in Trump’s Muslim Ban list. This already mostly unknown land will now be even less accessible. This reason alone would suffice to motivate the choice of photographing the country under a different, detached and less propagandistic light. Other issues though emerge in the encounter with this region of the world.

This series of photographs was taken while roaming the Iranian central desert and the cities within. So many different populations, religions and empires have followed one other for millennia, inhabiting these lands, reaching peaks of astonishing balance with their surroundings. Mithraic temples, Zoroastrian villages, Persian cities, they all were conceived and built in a perfect symbiosis with the land.

And yet today there seems to be a kind of ambiguous struggle to fit in these territories. A latent friction emerge between the human presence and the environment. Things seems to be out of place: ambiguous objects, unfinished buildings, indefinite traces of the mankind are left behind, lying isolated and scattered on the ground. It’s “the mutual interference between the landscape and those who live it” as Baltz wrote in his Review of the “The New West”.

It may seems outdated nowadays to still talk about the issues raised by the new topographers more than forty years ago. But it must be kept in mind that Iran hasn’t yet started to develop a proper sensibility to the ecological and aesthetical problems of the landscape. The way people live the territory and live inside the territory no longer relies on the fusion with the surroundings, but rather on the separation from it. Too often the landscape is literally kept out. Almost everything that is built in these lands is surrounded with walls that keep out the rest of the world. One could wonder if this derives from the ancient Persian gardens, however, the paradise is not anymore within these walls, but outside them, hidden from the view.

Aug 10

Aug 10 Karen Bullock

Presence Obscured | This series explores the shifting culture of Christianity in the American South and my own experience of faith.

It was during a difficult pregnancy followed by a miscarriage, that I first felt as if God was still there, somewhere, but off in another room. That disorienting sense of presence obscured often remains years later, even as I recall times when I felt drenched in possibility and light.
Still, I find peace when I enter an empty sanctuary, a space hushed and full of the echoes of conversations and prayers which have lingered through the years. I sit and listen to the creaks, touch the hymnals frayed from use, and experience a depth of solitude. Photography becomes a prayer.

I step outside and see reminders of God everywhere: on bumper stickers, yard signs, and telephone poles. In the wider landscape, out under the sky, I feel small and begin to think we are like little children wearing tinsel halos and catawampus wings.

A while later, I turn down a red dirt road and see the closed doors and curtained windows of an abandoned church. Will it be lovingly restored or forgotten and crumble to the ground? I want it to be remembered as it is now, these weathered walls, this door, that humble steeple. There is something here, resilience, memory, a whisper coated in peeling paint.

“The Song of Songs” comes to my mind. It is a love poem, a story of adoration, of searching and wistfulness. Through these photographs, I share what I perceive as an ethereal sense of presence alongside themes of longing and loss. The project is personal, yet also an open-ended offering to the viewer to ponder varied experiences of faith, whatever that might mean for the individual, especially in the midst of trauma or crises such as the world is enduring now. www.karenbphotos.com

Emily Thornhill

Aug 6

Aug 6 Emily Thornhill

God’s Little Acre | The series ‘God’s Little Acre’ is a study of the tiny and often forgotten chapels of Cornwall, that reside in the most secluded of places. Serving sometimes only handfuls of people, these intricate buildings illustrate incredible levels of devotion and faith.

The design and creation of each church is an expression of the beliefs of all those involved, with each building acting as a haven from the outside world for its visitors, no matter their religious orientation. As society changes and becomes ever more secular, the role of churches within everyday life appears to be diminishing, yet they are still present within our landscapes and act as relics of the past.

Emily Thornhill is a photographer and visual artist based in the South West of England. Her practice is heavily influenced by her love for the natural world and caring for everything within it through a childhood spent in rural Cornwall. Her personal work is created from an interest in religion, philosophy and history and explores the relationship between humanity and our surrounding environment.

She enjoys experimenting with alternative photographic processes and found photography by collecting and incorporating organic substances and natural matter into her practice. The extensive research into her subjects that spans across literary, historical, philosophical, geographical, political and personal references is crucial to fully understanding the themes and contexts she is working within and contributing to. www.emilythornhill.format.com

Jasmine De Silva

Aug 5

Aug 5 Jasmine De Silva

Jul 30

Jul 30 Samuel Fradley

A Handshake with a Martian | The idea of exploring the UFO phenomena deprived from my own underlying feeling of the unknown. The fear of the future, the fear of the past and the fear of what surrounds us. The unknown leaves me feeling lost and overwhelmed. Humanity fails to ask and consider the important questions that explains our existence. People will pray to a god that they have never seen or met, but yet the existence of extra-terrestrial life visiting earth is laughed at by some and claimed to be implausible by others. The question is why? Are people too scared to try and discover the truth? or have we been trained to desensitise ourselves from reality and ignore the rebarbative question to why or how we even exist.

Provoked by my inner curiosity into the UFO scene in the United Kingdom, A Handshake with a Martian is a personal investigation into the British UFO phenomena. I embark on a journey that takes me across the UK to try and understand what has occurred. Supported by official declassified documents, this project is a photographic response to my journey. I meet the people who believe in and research UFOS, as well as visit the locations where these famous sightings happened.

This project began in 2018 and is still ongoing as of 2020. www.samuelfradley.com

Jul 29

Jul 29 Daniel Dale

A Field Guide to Happiness | A Field Guide to Happiness, is an ongoing search for something we all agree exists but no one can prove - happiness. Meticulously collected, these colour photographs are presented as evidence of intentional and unintentional everyday actions that, both singularly and as a sum of their parts, evokes something close to a smile. The abstract fascination with the ‘ordinary’, surrounds us and unfolds into an offbeat and ostensive questioning that repeatedly asks, ‘Is this an example of happiness?’ www.danieldale.co.uk

Shiri Rozenberg

Jul 27

Jul 27 Shiri Rozenberg

Outside of One’s Own | I didn't leave the house for two whole months. I couldn't work and mostly was filled with mixed emotions, felt like I had no air, no idea what's allowed, what's not, where to draw the line, if there are any at all. As a photographer whose field of work is based on sampling my environment and bringing it to my studio, I was locked.

The reality was absolutely the opposite, the disconnection was and is - paralyzing. The fast changes finally made me react, my studio transformed its shape and was touring with me all over the country. My aspiration was to create an alternative sterile area, a personal space, according to the limitations that each photoshoot brought.

I find it fascinating to wonder about intimacy in photography while wearing these masks. It's a layer of protection that is supposed to keep you distant and safe, however, in real-time, it functions as a connection point between the participants and me. Their eyes made me feel closer to them and to create, even just for a short time, an essence, together. www.shirirozenberg.com

Sandro Livio Straube

Jul 23

Jul 23 Sandro Livio Straube

Berge bleichen / Mountains Bleach |„It's about the idea of escaping from density and saturation in order to feel time and slowness again.“

„Berge bleichen“ takes place in the small valley "Val Lumnezia" in the Swiss Graubünden.

An glen with one entrance and no exit, with one road and no tunnel to the next area. No pass road winds up. This creates calm, a pale island in a saturated country like Switzerland. Things are left standing, time can pass, clocks run behind. Nobody cares. The light of the sun is strong and proudly shows its traces. It peels color, bleaches nature and man-made things in it.

Mountains are serious and often scary. They talk about life and death, about permanence and transience. They don't easily reveal history and secrets.

With „Berge bleichen" I wanted to show the previously described, different picture of the mountains. The opposite of the romantic picture that everyone knows. Apart from tourism and pure infrastructure, places in the valley have been sought that are simply allowed to be. Without claims to meaning and purpose for the masses. The pure undemanding itself - at first glance. Because they need great attention to the apparently invisible. Things that seem trivial to us at first and only reveal something deeper, if we look closely and intensively. These objects and landscapes make us reflect on the transient nature of things and lets us appreciate the beauty of decay again.

Ksenia Sidorova

Jul 22

Jul 22 Ksenia Sidorova

Olga | I’m a visual artist and work mainly with photography and video art. I am based in Moscow, Russia.
Why am I doing this, why are others doing this?

As an artist, I am interested in the causes of conscious and unconscious motives of people’s behaviors in a society dominated by social and cultural attitudes and stereotypes. An important theme in my work is the norms and the ambivalent meanings of them. Norms are one of the factors that determine a person’s behavior and existence in society. At the same time, the norm has different meanings: value judgment, coercion, the ideal or average value. In my projects, I study social norms and the consequences of their impacts on people, the society, and the environment.

My projects have featured in some exhibitions and festivals such as Krakow Photomonth ShowOFF, Kassel Dummy Award, Batumi PhotoDays. My work has been published in some magazines and online media including YET, PHmuseum, FK Magazine, FishEye Magazine, Colta.ru, Bird In Flight. www.kseniasidorova.com

Charles Thiefaine

Jul 20

Jul 20 Charles Thiefaine

Ala Allah | Ala Allah is a series of documentary images on everyday life. Charles Thiefaine attempts to drag the audience into the Iraqi society.

Through portraits, ordinary scraps to street life, we blend into the intimacy of these complex, anxious characters. Stories assemble and cross each others. Incomplete narratives are shaped, planting seed of doubt around one’s identity and personality.

Some of these photographs reveal the presence of the photograph in everyday moments such as family pictures or action scenes. Some others convene what is out of frame and out of time, this can take, for instance, the form of someone looking beyond the frame.

Thus, the series draws possible narratives, and leads the public towards events that have or will occur. No matter where the truth lies, this singular piece tries to reverse the dramatic vision we have on Iraqis daily reality, dodging the daze.

How are they putting up their environment? How are they occupying their territory? – Ala Allah – comes along with a set of thoughts, unfolding trough the narrative. It addresses various themes such as family, friends, teenage years, love or wedding, war, loneliness, memory, boredom or party. www.charlesthiefaine.com

Alexandre Desane

Jul 15

Jul 15 Alexandre Desane

Crepus | Crepus is an on-going series on Black hair of Black people in France. I’ve started this series back in 2019, it is exclusively shot in Black & White film with a Street photography approach.

My name is Alexandre Desane, I was born in France, of Haitian parents, Frizzy hair is obviously part of my everyday life. I chose to shoot outside, within the city to give a good representation of Black hair. I don’t want no studio, no extra lighting. It’s important to me to show Black hair in everyday life on women, men, and children in order to show the beauty and charisma of Black hair.
Crepus is a celebration of the uniqueness of Black hair. www.instagram.com/gachis.visionudio, no extra lighting. It’s important to me to show Black hair in everyday life on women, men, and children in order to show the beauty and charisma of Black hair.
Crepus is a celebration of the uniqueness of Black hair. www.instagram.com/gachis.vision

Giulia De Marchi

Jul 14

Jul 14 Giulia De Marchi

Lucente | When we look at the world, we do it with the awareness of carrying out an action towards what’s in front of us. For this reason we travel, visit museums and even return to the same places sometime after.
What we are looking at stops before us with a call, asking for an undetermined waiting time that comes with a simple assumption: we can’t have enough of it.

Being in that room, on that beach or sitting on that bench right at that moment is both the result of a decision that led to a circumstance but also to a circumstance that flowed into an action. For some reason, obvious or not, we are there, listening. The way in which this happens is dictated by personal variables that push us to take a stand and to play a role, for which we have a conscious view of what is happening before us, trivially the flow of things, while forgetting everything that’s behind us. It may happen for a very long time or just for a second, but it happens all the time.

But how’s the world behind us? Who is watching us while we are living that moment? How does the visual field appear with us in the middle? These are the thoughts that come to mind while I’m shooting, portraying someone who is aware of what is in front of him but has no consciousness of what he’s producing by being there, in that exact moment. It is as if, in his distraction, he’s unconsciously posing, waiting to create radiant scenes with the surrounding environment of life that soon then runs away, with its own thoughts in motion.
Then the landscape transforms itself and takes away the presence of my model, as if it had no more memory. Maybe it will wait for others, ready to adopt a new and unique role that I won’t be able to shoot. giuliademarchi.com

Tristan Martinez

Jul 13

Jul 13 Tristan Martinez

Heads | Heads is a visual study of trivial interactions we encounter in our day to day life. Associating fleeting moments with individuals in comparison to the mundanity of objects, questions the importance of perception. This is a visual exploration of what is overlooked. Photographic techniques such as frontal framing, fragmentation as well as visual objectivity opens up the conversation to the viewer allowing them to make meaning of the image, space, or interaction set before them.
The faceless identity of the individual flashed from behind, juxtaposed with objects allows the viewer to create their own conversation around this body of work. The ephemerality of interaction and the awareness to surroundings are central within this conversation of daily life.

The conceptual interest and photographic language is inspired by the work of photographers such as Chris Maggio, John Edmonds, and Alec Soth. Stylistically referencing Hoods by John Edmonds puts the project within conversation to identity. While formally referencing the works of Alec Soth and Chris Maggio, Heads addresses the relationship of the meaning of an image in context to a whole body of work. tristanmartinezphoto.com

Jul 9

Jul 9 Mariano Vimos

Evictions in Ciudad Bolivar: A social problem in times of pandemic. Case: Altos de la Estancia | On May 2nd the police eviction operation of an invasion neighborhood known as “Altos de La Estancia” began, located on a district property Ciudad Bolívar, where displaced by armed conflict, Venezuelans immigrants, ex-combatants from different illegal armed groups lived, among others.

Since the start of the operation, more than 300 families have been evicted, despite the parallel to this, Colombia has recorded the highest rates of contagion by COVID-19, declaring southern Bogotá on orange alert based on the risk of contagion in this area. Due to the economic crisis caused by the presence of COVID-19, the inhabitants of the area have asked the district for help, since the vast majority do not have a secure source of income, the district claims to have given guarantees to the evicted inhabitants as market subsidies and the amount needed for a month’s lease elsewhere.

The problem of evictions in this property is nothing new, for several years three eviction operatives have been carried out, the last one comes developing from the end of 2019 to mas 2 ,2020, the latter was ordered to evict the inhabitants (including minors, older adults and pregnant women) using force, these clashes against the physical integrity of some inhabitants. marianojosevimos.wixsite.com/marianovimos

Stefano Fristachi

Jul 6

Jul 6 Stefano Fristachi

LONELINETS | Did you ever hear the sound of the nets? No possible, its only perceivable when the nets are alone.

Loneliness understood as a consideration for the inability to love and offer solidarity, accompanies man throughout his life. We do not free ourselves from loneliness, and it is therefore a good thing to make an honest agreement with it. Exactly as happens to the Nets, which are able to make us embrace happy when they get excited, or to make us feel so alone when abandoned they cannot give us emotions; however, they remain the symbol of play, of distraction beyond time and consciousness.

Loneliness shows to the human being all the misery of his life, and leads him hopelessly to account for himself, to confront himself with a reality of which he feels confusion and absurdity. It is precisely for this reason the need to be strong to love it, to bear its weight throughout the days of life. Its only wealth, is what it does not have; that space of nothing that surrounds it.

No comfort is possible, except perhaps a tremendous, too desolate freedom in which to get lost in a limitless desert. A turn to disappear, to escape from life.

... in the most terrible hour, that of the evening, when the weight of the day just passed still weighs, a scream, a cry, is heard breaking from the throat. But we must resist, we must struggle with this weakness, if we abandon ourselves to tiredness, then we could no longer satisfy that desire for detachment, for silence, for solitude. So solitude is yes, a tremendous weight, but it is also a love: a love for freedom, for truth, for the poor roads and fields of the world. www.stefanofristachi.com

Jul 3

Jul 3 Pola Rader

ISO Sun | ISO Sun is a photo project that explores mental state of people during self-isolation in the light of the positive side of loneliness. This series of images is inspired by the time of self-isolation during coronavirus pandemic that I and my daughter spent together.

This is a kind of visual experiment of dissolving common “mixed emotions” in single parts. Each image is a statement about these feelings that crystallize inside us when we spend more time by ourselves. Such as unity with nature, daydreaming, expectation, anxiety, inner conflicts and fears…

This is the story of the personal experience of self-isolation as a process of self-knowledge, providing a new confident look at oneself.

Jun 29

Jun 29 Eva Watkins

Synchronized Swimming | The unique synchronized swimming group initially formed to celebrate the 100th year anniversary of Henleaze Swimming Lake, Bristol. Consisting of 80 mixed gender people, aged 11-76, they have created a space where strong friendships have formed, enabling them to share significant life moments with one another. This already positive bonding experience, submerging oneself in water releases Oxytocin, also known as the happy hormone, is widely recognised to improve mental health. www.evawatkins.co.uk

Jun 27

Jun 27 Mark Griffiths

These Four Walls Are Closing In | “There is no darkness like that of a confined space.”
- Lauren DeStefano, Author.

The following images are a visual metaphor for the feeling of being isolated and the apprehension of the unknown during the ongoing enforced lockdown currently in operation.

The pictures are a representation of my mental and physical wellbeing from being isolated or confined to a space for a prolonged period and convey my thoughts and feelings towards an uncertain future during the corona virus pandemic.

Making this work allows me to express my inner anguish and worries about the situation we are facing and provides me with a therapeutic sense of purpose whilst confined within the four walls of my one bedroom flat. www.markgriffithsphotography.com