Aishah Kenton

Aishah Kenton

Dana Stirling

Second Exit | Second Exit examines the richness of colour found across regional and remote areas of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland.

This series explores the unique power of the photographic image, revealing an artist reaching for an elusive present while framing it within an ambiguous sense of the past.

Kenton explores the world as she encounters it, often including her husband in the photographs she makes. While Second Exit speaks of an unfamiliar environment to the artist - that of outback Australia - Kenton never fails to appreciate the subjects she finds within her own reach; the all too-easily ignored moment of filling up the car, or resting in a motel room. Even a towel on a caravan door doesn't escape her interest.

The subjects in Second Exit weren’t chosen to represent a particular theme or circumstance relating to the Australian bush narrative; far from it, in fact. The only intention Kenton had when making this set of photographs was to explore the medium of photography itself, for the first time in colour. It just so happened that this recent interest in colour photography coincided with a planned road tip with her husband, the couple travelling over 10,000km across South East Australia in just under two months.

A diary filled with visual explorations of colour and intrigue, Second Exit will forever be associated with the artist’s first visit through the Australian interior. Kenton’s photographs are the results of her own visual investigations, a fixed lens showing things as they are and as she saw them; unromantic and sparse, loving and full of life. www.aishahkenton.com

Nicole Buchanan

Nicole Buchanan

Dana Stirling

The Skin I’m In | Racial strife is as old as our nation. Violence around recent incidents between African American communities and the police has reached such a crescendo that it may mark a second coming of the civil rights movement. As an artist, I wanted my photographic portraits to express my hope for peace and my outrage at the unfair treatment of seemingly innocent individuals.

“The Skin I’m In” asks the viewer to consider the dignity of individuals who self-identify as African, African American or from the wider African Diaspora in uniformly posed solo portraits taken in a luminous, romantic light. Each person is emerging from a black background in the tradition of the Italian painter Caravaggio, whose soft directional lighting gently highlighted the dimensionality of facial features and the tonality and texture of the skin.

Symbolically, my subjects are stepping out of a darkness filled with fear, misunderstanding and confusion into a rightful sense of identity. The resplendent range of skin tones and textures portrayed helps to challenge the stereotype of these individuals being viewed similarly, while their deliberately impartial expressions, neither aggressive nor submissive, defy easy racial presumptions by viewers. The uniformity of composition underscores our similarities, while each portrait possesses particular features and nuances that demonstrate the individual’s personal dignity. It is my hope that these portraits help people know that each of us merits respect, whatever skin we’re in. www.nicolebuchanan.com

Greg Sand

Greg Sand

Dana Stirling

Chronicle | In Chronicle I combine 1/2” and 1” square pieces cut from found photographs to examine the fragmentation of memories. When recalling our childhood, we may remember the shoes our father always wore or the way our mother held her hands: a part represents the whole. Photographs function in a similar manner. They do not show a whole person or an entire life, but instead capture a single moment. These keepsakes help determine some of the pieces of memory that stick with us.

This series started as an exploration of the overwhelming scope of humanity and human history and the insignificance of the individual. I wanted to find a visual representation of the approximately 6,393 deaths that occur every hour in the world. I made the piece Chronicle: Passing (6,393 Per Hour) to try to comprehend this staggering figure. I moved on to other subjects that are more about the nature of memory. The themes of death and loss are present throughout the series – most blatantly in the images of funerary flowers and disembodied shadows – as the source photos I use often have a built-in sense of history and sadness. www.gregsand.net

Eric Kaczmarczyk

Eric Kaczmarczyk

Dana Stirling

Everyone's Communicating | Everyone’s Communicating is an ongoing project about the nuanced lack of connection between human beings. With a constant bombardment of information, I feel that there is limited time to emotionally process it all. And as a member of society, I feel that there is a pressure to fit in regardless.

I’ve always been a sort of rigid person who requires a systematically organized life; even while creating art, I often tried to overly conceptualize my feelings, resulting in a type of photo illustration. This method tended to land somewhere on the surface, struggling to figure out what it all means. About 10 years ago, a college professor of mine suggested that I go out into the world and photograph without “thinking” or “planning.” After years of emotionally undoing expectations, I began a transition to a stream of consciousness. I began to understand the subtleties.

These themes have manifested in a variety of imagery including: technological devices, oppressive structures, authoritarian iconography, remnants of human expression, attempts at containment, failures of communication, a desire to connect, moods evoked by nature and an opportunity to reflect. As Maxson J. McDowell states, “At birth the infant emerges from a container, the womb, which had previously met all needs. The infant's personality must then organize itself to ensure continued physical and psychological containment.” www.erickaczmarczyk.com

Galina Kurlat

Galina Kurlat

Dana Stirling

SHADOW PLAY | Removed from the day-to-day experience of childhood and photographed in front of a stark, black background, these children express a distilled honesty and tender vulnerability. By reducing these variables, Kurlat creates an organic visual dialogue between sitter and camera photographing her subjects in a quiet setting devoid of distraction; a space that is conducive to the child being completely engaged in the process of making the photograph.

The ritual of making a wet collodion photograph is in itself an important aspect to this body of work. Collodion is poured onto a plate which becomes sensitized using a bath of silver nitrate. The image is then developed on the spot to create a physical object and a likeness of the child, an ephemeral event only existing in that one moment.

The final result is a collaborative effort.

Kurlat creates an open environment for the child to direct essential aspects of the photographs with their expression, gesture and gaze. Some children embrace this unfamiliar process of being photographed while others are defiant of the camera. With each image, we further see how important it is to acknowledge both the innocence and complexities of childhood. www.galinakurlat.com

Diana Cheren Nygren

Diana Cheren Nygren

Dana Stirling

When the Trees Are Gone | Surroundings play a dominant role in shaping experience. I treasure the city and try to make space for quiet contemplation within it. Born out of three ongoing series, this series imagines city dwellers searching for moments of relief in a world shaped by climate change, and the struggle to find a balance between an environment in crisis and manmade structures.

The question of the struggle between nature and the built environment is ever more central in urban life. In these images, relaxed beachgoers find themselves amidst carefully composed urban settings in front of dramatic skies. They search without seeming to find what they are looking for. The beach becomes rising tides, threatening the very foundation of the city. The clash of nature and city results in an absurd profusion of visual noise and little relief. The resulting images lay bare challenges to both my urban fantasy and to city planners, and the problematic nature of the future that lies ahead for humanity and the planet. www.dianacherennygren.com

Barbara Arcuschin

Barbara Arcuschin

Dana Stirling

Barbara is an argentine street photographer, who finds beauty and fashion in the odd and common, documenting people from around the globe with an impromptu approach, revealing her admiration towards different ethnographies. Her 35mm analog photographs and cellphone snapshots recreate a moment of stillness in the ordinary day, provoking something striking, aesthetic, spontaneous, rawness, real, humorous and provocative. barbiarcuschinphoto.com

Rashod Taylor

Rashod Taylor

Dana Stirling

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

Alyssa Leigh Thorn

Dana Stirling

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

Leonardo Magrelli

Dana Stirling

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.

Karen Bullock

Karen Bullock

Dana Stirling

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

Emily Thornhill

Dana Stirling

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

Samuel Fradley

Samuel Fradley

Dana Stirling

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

Daniel Dale

Daniel Dale

Dana Stirling

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

Shiri Rozenberg

Dana Stirling

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

Sandro Livio Straube

Dana Stirling

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

Ksenia Sidorova

Dana Stirling

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

Charles Thiefaine

Dana Stirling

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

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