Dennis Schnieber

Dennis Schnieber

Dana Stirling

The following selection is part of an ongoing body of work, in which I try to find modest compositions, that exceed the sheer representation of the objects within, but rather emphasize a somewhat offbeat interplay amongst, uncover inconspicuous shapes or study the fusion of light and surface.

While sometimes the images might concentrate on an abstract detail or texture, I often look for a wider assemblage, as an aesthetic atmosphere pulling it all together, thus keeping the objects recognizable as what they are. This method leads to a documentation of the familiar with components of irritation or surrealness.

Even though the scenes are devoid of people, they never seem to me to be lifeless, as every piece in it transforms itself over time and is influenced or even designed by humans, adding an implicit, sometimes even visible social sediment to it.

Ultimately I understand the process as working on some sort of exhibition catalogue, gathering aesthetic by-products, occasionally short-lived or entirely dissolving in their down- to-earth embedment. www.instagram.com/dennisschnieber

Alexia Villard

Alexia Villard

Dana Stirling

HOME STORIES | These images were taken in Berlin during the recent Covid- 19 lockdown. During 3 months we have isolated ourselves with my young daughter and partner. Our apartment has only two separate rooms: our daughter's room and an open space including a kitchen, living space and bedroom.

Throughout this period of time personal space was substantially altered and while we were pressured to mainly stay inside, our behavior changed — the way our bodies circulate, move and connect shifted; By contact, we were compiled to realize our human being texture and feel ; To be read as an archive of human resilience. www.alexiavillard.com

Hugo Henry

Hugo Henry

Dana Stirling

Becoming a Man | The body changes, so do the desires. The body becomes more robust and above all it becomes an asset of seduction. Becoming a man is a series that I did for a few months with my little brother who becomes more and more adult as soon as I see him again.

Adolescence is the age of confrontation, it's the age of rebellion. Tom, only wishes to become an adventurer. Lulled by the novels of Jules Vernes and more recently by the expeditions of Mike Horn, he never stops wanting to sculpt a body and an image that his heroes send back to him.

At a time of identification and loss of certain points of reference, nature and adventure remain for Tom an escape route, an environment where he can be himself, without feeling out of step with people his own age. To be 16 today is to seek digital socialization, to debate digitally, to stay hours behind a screen to live shared adventures live on the networks. Testimony of a pivotal period, the identity path of a young man in the making. www.hugohenry.work

Sutapa Roy

Sutapa Roy

Dana Stirling

Wish My Butterfly Would Live Forever | The more I started to feel losing control of my outer world, the more I started to hold inside me the person whom I love the most. I started taking picture of her – my daughter. During the Corona pandemic and lockdown thereof, I got perfect opportunity to spend lot more time with her, who has just stepped into teenage life. I got a chance to observe and understand her even more deeply. Initially the purpose of my image making was just to nourish my curiosity and seeing her adapting (or not) the new lifestyle away from school in the tough hours of social distancing. As I started to spend more time with her and being around her every moment, I started to explore her visions, so sublime and pre-eminent. “I would be a protector of the nature to safeguard forests, seas and sky. I would have my own place way far from these concrete jungle, under the blue and starry sky; butterflies will be my friends and flowers my finery” – she said. My initial thought of images took a new direction from here onwards. The new path I chose was an attempt to represent the girl and her thoughts visually; the images went back and forth between the person and her vision and the story made its trail somewhere in between accordingly.

The improvement of global health and seeking for a better earth is an emergency now and it is not possible for one or two to make any change which is so badly needed in the present global health situation. And from a different stand point, we are facing the ultimate question – what are we leaving for our future generation? Who is responsible for all these chaos and who is going to heal it? Eventually “Wish my butterfly would live forever” develops to be more like a fantasy of the girl that questions all our concern and desire to act for healing of mother Earth. Conceivably the story is an attempt to picture the girl lost in her imagined world. Images are fusion of organic and staging moments, along with lines written by her, taken only at my home in Kolkata during pandemic lockdown.

I believe apart from the perspective of a mother daughter relationship this story has the potential to give us a realization that we can certainly heal our world if we earnestly want to, and for that, we have to have a dream to achieve or to protect our own planet, just like maintaining safety of our homes during the pandemic. I hope this journey has helped me to grow as a person and has allowed me to explore different ideas to implement my feelings.

As another day just passed by and the sun touching the horizon, saying a warmth good bye for another bright morning. The wounded butterfly Suhani caught yesterday and treated it with all her care and tenderness, just flew away. She said, “Ma, wish my butterfly would live forever”. www.sutaparoy.com

Annemiek Hofer

Annemiek Hofer

Dana Stirling

Wild Rose | These photographs were taken while I was stuck in Canada during the pandemic. I went beginning March to visit my dad, and made it back to Belgium (where I live) early May. During my stay, we drove around the Alberta province. I was amazed at the ruins of the old farming towns. Being from Europe, it was completely different from anything I had ever seen before. And it all seemed very apocalyptic, especially considering the situation of the current event. Almost every day we went on long drives to observe the Albertan ladnscapes and «Landfills» of the western era. After several months I collected a lot of images that conveyed to me a lonely and ghost like atmosphere. It is a side to Canada that we don't see very much, but a very real side that is relevant to its history.

Vikesh Kapoor

Vikesh Kapoor

Dana Stirling

See You at Home​ | My ongoing project ​See You at Home​ (2017 - present) ​is a personal narrative that centers on family, memory and the myth and melancholy surrounding the American Dream.

My parents, Shailendra and Sarla Kapoor, immigrated from India in 1973, settling in a small town of 10,000 people in rural Pennsylvania. They are one of only a few immigrant families in the region. While they left India for a better life, the shift from a collectivist nation to an individualistic one led to isolation just as much as it led to freedom. As they grow old in Pennsylvania with​ ​my sister and I no longer living nearby, their isolation only becomes more apparent to me. ​

I began making work about my family during a trip to India with my father, fifteen years ago. I hadn’t visited since I was a child, and it was my father’s first time in sixteen years. It was important for both of us. Questions of family, identity and personal history were born out of that trip and continue to inform ​my work and this project today.

Se​e You at Home​ ​explores the dichotomy of home and homeland, freedom and isolation, collectivism and individualism, through images I make of my parents’ current life in America imbued with memories of their past.​ ​Although this personal narrative began as an examination of diaspora, aging and the unique duties that fall to the only son of Asian immigrants, my hope is that ​​See You at Home​​ will resonate with other first-generation Americans and those interested in the myth of the American identity, seeking to find place and purpose here. vikeshkapoor.com

Sandra Mickiewicz

Sandra Mickiewicz

Dana Stirling

Proud of the Origin | As the Gyps and Travellers community is a small minority in the hugely diverse British society, my intention was to portray them as sympathetic and sociable people as opposed to the typical stereotypes. I hope this project will contribute to changing the dominant point of view and our thinking about Gypsies and Travellers.

Most importantly, I want the audience to realise that the subjects I photograph are valuable members of society. This body of work is still in progress and my aim is capture the resolute, spirited nature of the people I have met and the pride they rightly feel towards their ancestry. I’ve always been interested in the community as I find their lifestyle very interesting. I am really inspired by their culture, clothes they wear and their faces. To me these people stand out from the crowd, even in our everyday life.

Because of their backgrounds and “typical stereotypes”, most Gypsies and Travellers had to face the racism and discrimination towards their culture and beliefs. Most of them are forced to hide their identity in order to attain employment or send their children to school. In this project, I want to explore their life traditions, and other aspects in their culture. www.sandramickiewicz.com

Svetlana Stankevich

Svetlana Stankevich

Dana Stirling

Luz silenciosa | It is believed that in the first half of life a human-being goes up and rolls down in the second. It explains the ambiguous perception of time: when time is watching out for us and when we are watching out for it. All 10-year-old Varvara’s days are long, do not include any plans and there is the obey to the adults family members.

Varvara is interested in the cost of land in front of her parents home where the shelter is built in the trees. “For what do you need it to know?”, “I wanna know in order to buy it and to live there with my husband or with dogs” – she has not decide yet.

The growth of a child can be observed as the creation of the universe. “Luz silenciosa” is Carlos Reygadas film where the silent celestial light is watching out for human aspirations and passions. Will the child rise in a new life up? Will the child build own world when will leave the parental home? In everyday fatalism and mysticism there is always the waiting for a miracle. This is the age of transition to another world, where the possession of responsibility and self- determination will take over. www.instagram.com/baranekbo

Stefano Semeraro

Stefano Semeraro

Dana Stirling

Mare Rurale | Mare Rurale tells, through images, of a little explored and known territory in which I lived part of my life. Specifically, it is about Specchiolla, a small seaside resort frequented mainly in summer, which stretches on the Brindisi coast. This area has been my reference point for many years as my parents owned a restaurant near its cliff. It is only when I stopped frequenting those places that I could really notice what was around me and its hidden beauty. My photographs show how architectural and natural elements coexist and interact with each other. I have already pictured the architecture-nature dualism in some of my previous projects as it is increasingly becoming my own signature when I capture the landscapes that I find myself in front of.

The name Mare Rurale (Rural Sea) refers to a specific characteristic of the Specchiolla area: the continuity between land and sea. In the collective imagination, these two ecosystems are quite distinct, while here they coexist harmonically. The inhabitants of this area take this rural landscape that touches the sea as ordinary sightseeing and do not realize of its interesting glimpses and amazing contrasts.
A good part of the inhabitants of the nearby villages, such as Carovigno and San Vito dei Normanni, are farmers or land owners that cultivate a variety of products and sell them in local and national markets. If you enter the narrow streets that cross these cultivated plots, you will come across large, rust-colored fields, mostly cultivated with tomatoes, wheat fields, fruit trees and local vegetables. These colorful fields create a sharp contrast with the strip of blue sea that overlaps in the distant background and welcomes and fascinates tourists. Dried stone walls and rock constructions alternate with newly constructed holiday homes and unfinished or abandoned works. All these constructions are in perfect harmony with huge fig trees, sea pines, coastal dunes and Mediterranean maquis.
These and other elements reveal an extraordinary corner of Apulian territory and tell us about this dualism between land and sea, all to be discovered. www.stefanogiosemeraro.it

Agne Rita Kucinskaite

Agne Rita Kucinskaite

Dana Stirling

River | River is a meditative journey through 150 miles of Thames Path, walked in eleven days. Taking inspiration from the history of landscape photography as well as documentary practices, I seek to question the concepts of success and failure, belonging and alienation. Images of recurrent natural elements are juxtaposed with overheard conversations and personal thoughts. I examine the arising tension between the outer and the inner to interrogate the collective unconscious and conduct an inquiry into the shadowed self.
This work is a personal reconciliation with the terra-incognita of the faraway which - in the words of Rebecca Solnit - one is deemed to never reach. www.agnerita.com

Claudia Ruiz Gustafson

Claudia Ruiz Gustafson

Dana Stirling

María | María is the inspiration for the third and last chapter of Historias fragmentadas, a photographic exercise of memory and imagination. While reflecting on my story, I noticed there was one important person missing; a live-in maid my parents hired when we moved to the suburbs of Lima when I was seven. She doesn’t appear in any family portrait and sadly, we don’t have record of her last name or her birthday. Domestic help in Perú is usually hired without written contracts, so attempts to locate her would be futile. Her name was María, and she eventually left us to start a family of her own. It was a sad departure for me because María had been my confidante, my friend, and my teacher, during a vulnerable time in my life. She sang to me in Quechua, the beautiful language of the Andes; she grew chamomile flowers for my anxiety; and she taught me simple games when I was lonely.

I created this series in my family home in Lima, Perú and in María’s home town of Villa El Salvador to photograph the streets where she might have walked. I worked with a Quechua woman whose name, coincidentally, was also María. For weeks we collaborated in the house where my parents still live today. Together we explored the same walls, the same floors, the same light that entered the same windows that my María experienced. The furniture and ornaments that she touched have remained unchanged over the years. Traveling to María’s hometown helped me connect with her memory. Through this project, I was able to honor an important woman in my life and the unconditional love that she gave me.

María is a conversation with the past, an intimate and personal revelation of connection and loss between where we come from and where we are. www.claudiafineart.com

Kevin Bennett Moore

Kevin Bennett Moore

Dana Stirling

Inspired by film of the 1950s and ’60s, my work is an exploration on the formation of character, narrative, and identity. These photographs are a world created to speak freely without interruption. By utilizing the past--both historic and cultural references--I am able to juxtapose queer existence with classic Americana. Although my work is made up predominantly of self-portraits, my goal is for viewers to consider their own responses to queerness as they see it. By applying my own identity and queer experience, I hope to engage the viewer in an unfamiliar set of circumstances.

Driven by emotion and intuition, I utilize melodrama to discuss ideas of visibility and invisibility, what is acknowledged and what is not-- questions that remain relevant in today’s politics. kevinbennettmoore.com

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

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