portfolios — FLOAT

Feb 11

Feb 11 Jean-Luc Feixa

Strange Things Behind Belgian Windows | As daily rhythms accelerate and our bodies get exhausted, our eyes crumble down without noticing the surrounding daily wonders and their numerous hidden details. To battle the poisonous lack of curiosity, I have always seen photography as a wonderful antidote. Through pictures we’re able to frame fragments of time and places that usually remain in oblivion. The “clic clac” of the camera captures an everyday live scene forever that once on paper it screams its strength and its vitality.

After three years living in Brussels, I also ended up getting too comfortable in the habit of labelled routines. I passed ten, fifty, maybe a hundred times in front of this local household window displaying a child’s game, without taking the time to linger on it. Then one day, by coincidence, I saw a bunch of young boys gathered in front of the crystal. They were all pointing at the colored construction, trying to guess which schoolyard companion was able to build such a structure. “Clic clac”, it was the first window that I photographed. On my way back home, I came across other personal museum, exposed to the sight of the hassled spectators. A dog on the watch, a portrait of Christ, a dusty Egyptian bust, a golden deer… These treasures, protected by their transparent shields, were the perfect photographic subjects. What is the story of this Elvis fan couple, this panda bear enthusiast, or this anonymous showing his stuffed fox?

Beyond their aesthetics, these spontaneous settings invited me to unveil some intimate stories that gently permeated into the public space, transforming the landscape of a given street into an unexpected and surreal social experience.

I sincerely thank the “Belgians” for this wonderful experience and I hope to pay them a quirky tribute with my series “Strange Things Behind Belgian Windows”. www.jeanlucfeixa.com

Feb 10

Feb 10 Vann Powell

The Rebirth of Tragedy | This series of black and white photographs evokes the emotions and feelings surrounding the phenomena of lost connection with nature. Myself and many others have struggled in a world that has become increasingly more drawn into the grips of technology and the ever present need for expanding growth and production. What have we lost in this trade for supposed progress?

The Rebirth of Tragedy takes Fredrich Nietzsche's seminal work "The Birth of Tragedy” as it’s philosophical scaffolding. Here the dualistic Nietzschean cosmos as it is constructed from the Apollonian (reason, order, traditional concepts of beauty) and the Dionysian (chaos, the ecstatic, intoxication) play out in two discordant factors, ambling within today's human/natural world relation. The images in The Rebirth of Tragedy look at the signs of growth, decay and unrequited attachment that have come to signify our stance and relation to nature. With signs of growth and separation from the natural world, I flesh out and draw attention to that feeling of lost place that may not be found again. As we move further away from a connection to the natural world, into an every more simulated Anthropocene, I wonder what else has been lost, and if there is any redemption to salvage. /www.vannthomaspowell.photography/

Anya Miroshnichenko

Feb 9

Feb 9 Anya Miroshnichenko

Room | After the death of a person, things and memory remain from him.

For a whole year I have been filming in the room where Ba used to live. Last summer she was gone and I had to sort out all of her things, many of which I didn’t even know existed. I took portraits with objects I didn’t understand, old sets, cracked plates and saucers, rusty nails, hammers, shabby coats or just dried flowers. At first I wanted to capture my interest and understand why a person needs so many things, why he surrounds himself with them, as if he himself becomes safer from more of them. Many people, generations Ba, who survived the war, famine, acquired deficiency syndrome. Things seemed to give confidence and security for any occasion in life. They were soothing. How many times have I seen Ba sort out bed linens or synthetic dresses “on the way out,” in which only she saw value. The ba kept them not in order to sort through the memory, although, of course, there were such. But most - as they say - were postponed for a rainy day.

Making portraits, I understood why I needed all this. I fixed myself in memory. Therefore, my visual language is rather poor and monotonous - portraits. I did them even with some kind of manic addiction, without analyzing and not investing in this process any initial goal or idea. I wanted to fix myself ... for memory. So that no one will forget me when my room becomes empty.

The Ba lived for things, and I transform these things into memory. I want to shout that I am, even when I disappear without a trace, like Ba ... kovai.ru

Ricardo Miguel Hernández

Feb 4

Feb 4 Ricardo Miguel Hernández

When the Memory Turns to Dust | When the memory turns to dust, for me as an artist it is a reflective process in which I combine empirical, psychological and critical things. I conceive the random gesture between the selection of a certain photographic document and the preconception in invoice of different stories, as a rescue practice where the apparently disposable, old or residual bear the weight of a memory that is presented to me as a pretext to recontextualize and resemantize the frozen story on photographic paper. I appropriate myself of a found testimony that covers the twenties and eighties of the last century; I archive it, classify it and transmute it into a new metaphor. I conscientiously manipulate, meticulously elaborate other realities, juxtaposed, assembled, mutilated, where I do not intend to disguise the traces of time on paper, nor the seams resulting from these photo collages.

I consider myself as a restless prowler, a visual archaeologist who operates technically and discursively on elasticity of a record of reality; an original story that I reactivate through the conception of an aesthetic ontology that encompasses the ideological, the social, the political, the religious, the familiar… This Series is a kind of built and resurrected testament in which meanings and mixtures of a culture such as the Cuban one, of mixed race and singular are distilled, which delights even today in nostalgia and sustenance of an astonishing and worn out ideal. I assemble landscapes, portraits, customs scenes or abstracts motifs to reformulate that individual/social memory; to enrich that heritage many times found within a Cuban family; and to offer a possible interstice that reminds us of who we are and how we see ourselves from the contemporary artistic debate. www.ricardomiguelhernandez.com

Feb 3

Feb 3 Evan Perkins

Grab Your Bibles, There's a Storm Comin' | I was raised in a small, religious community. All aspects of my education and community were predicted upon these beliefs. Social status was informed by legalism, piety was the currency of choice. Questioning authority was discouraged and blind faith was the sole response to each and every situation.

Only years after moving away from this community did I realize how disconnected my upbringing was. Under further scrutiny, the foundations of what I was taught weren’t the strongholds I was promised. Blind dogma and fundamentalism were insufficient means to experience other individuals and the world around me. Issues and conflicts were no longer the polarizing duality of this or that but rather a complex in-between that had never been encouraged to explore. The veneer of piety and undeniable truth began to peel away, revealing people equally as unsure and broken as the rest of those around me.

With social and political tensions heightening in the last four years, (and escalating for decades prior), I began to view this upbringing as a microcosm of the white, religious, American experience that is too commonly viewed as the assumed American perspective, anything else a deviation. Our country divides itself around fabricated facades, forgetting that we all still share basic human fears and desires. People and issues are reduced to their most oversimplified state, used to reinforce pre existing divisions that have been constructed throughout our country’s history.

The images in Grab Your Bibles, There’s a Storm Comin’, create a fictitious community, full of contradiction and paradox; used to invite a dissection of the white, religious, Americans, that our systems of influence have continually granted the most power. It is an exploration of the ways in which groups conform to a prescribed set of moral beliefs and rituals in search for certainty in a world where the comforts of conviction seem forever out of reach. evanperkinsphotography.com

Jan 26

Jan 26 Josh Chaney

Nuclear Family | Nuclear Family is a photo project about the relationship between my family and Port Penn, Delaware where my grandpa lives. It is a reflection on my many summer visits to the area, my aging grandpa, my fluctuating family dynamics, and how this landscape has acted as a backdrop for these experiences and emotions over the years. joshchaneyphoto.com

Leah Nash and Chris Onstott

Jan 19

Jan 19 Leah Nash and Chris Onstott

Population Isolation | This project began during a period of unwanted and unexpected isolation, brought on by the COVID-19 Pandemic. With all photographic work at a sudden standstill, we began with self-portraits as a way to wrestle with our own anxiety and preserve an unprecedented time in history. As photographers that is how we naturally respond to things. We photograph them, if only to have a record of their existence.

We then moved outward, contacting friends, family, neighbors, using Craigslist. We sought all ages, economic groups, races, genders, and sexual orientations. For the pandemic became a strangely unifying experience, regardless of who you were or what you believed, we were all isolated together. The project revealed a shared humanity, as we explored conditions of aloneness as proof of belonging.

Inspired by Edward Hopper, the narratives appear as if stills for a movie or tableaux in a play. Yet, though crafted, our work is informed by our photojournalistic roots and is documentary at its core. Each image is a retelling of a person's story inspired by how they were feeling, how life had changed and what they were doing to cope (or not cope) during the COVID lockdown. To the viewer it is as if you have happened upon a scene, a series of uneasy moments marked by a vague feeling that something is not quite right.

During the time while our world was closed, we documented rage, laughter, tears, joy, and fear, sometimes all in a single session. The challenge was to create intimacy from a distance, which is a question we all will be asking for years to come. So we pushed on, looking for connection. As photographers we crave it, it is the reason why we do what we do. To see how people live, see how they survive and to help them feel seen and heard. Even when, especially when, we are in isolation. www.nashcophoto.com

Juan Rodríguez Morales

Jan 14

Jan 14 Juan Rodríguez Morales

POSTCARDS FROM L.A | As a street photographer I enjoy developing long-term projects. I use to visit the same places over and over again looking for the perfect picture I have in my mind, which eludes my camera so many times.

The chance of returning to the same place helped me to deepen the projects I have developed so far. Some places catch you irresistibly from the very first moment, even if you never see them again, making you feel the need to capture some of their energy in a brand new series of pictures. One of these places is the city of Los Angeles. Colorful neighborhoods, crowded beaches, harsh streets, social injustice, rundown landscapes, festive atmosphere, trendy neighborhoods... all blending out to offer endless possibilities to the street photographer.

What started as a simple sightseeing tour became an exciting project, a kind of travel diary, in which I wanted to experiment combining new formats and techniques to show a personal mosaic of my experience in this amazing city.

Giacomo Alberico

Jan 13

Jan 13 Giacomo Alberico

After the Gold Rush | The Visigoth king Alarico I in 410 AD carried out the famous 'Sack of Rome' with his army. By conquering the city of Rome he plundered a huge amount of gold, silver and rare relics. During the journey to reach the African coast, Alarico and his army are hit by a strong storm at sea, which destroying the fleet will force them to stop on the coast of Calabria and then take refuge in Cosenza.

The king, according to legend, died shortly afterwards of an illness and was buried with the famous treasure in the riverbed of the Busento river that passes through the historical centre of the city. In the years to come, well-known personalities, german nazis, researchers and simple amateurs will try in vain to find this unknown place.

The project illustrates the traces left over the years by people, by nature itself and by imaginary events that the fictitious presence of gold may have triggered in Calabria. Using the story in question as a background, I explored a naturalistically unique land, with ancient popular traditions, but difficult on the socio-economic side due to the presence of powerful local organized crime and lack of funds to truly renew itself. www.giacomoalberico.com

Gian Marco Sanna

Jan 12

Jan 12 Gian Marco Sanna

AGARTHI | When walking along the shores of Lake Bolsena one is made aware of its distinctive and particular ambience.The water with its many colors and sounds, all of which play a crucial part in the natural cycle of the lake, its flora and fauna. The lake, a fascinating and mysterious place, over which many myths and legends hover. There are several stories about people going missing on the lake, and never found.

The most recent was in 2007, when a man and his young children simply disappeared, and were never found. Widely held beliefs take us back to the legend of “The Gate of Agarthi” a mythical place located on Bisentina Island, one of only two islands on the lake. Bisentina is believed to be the point of contact between “terra firma” and its mythical parallel - the legendary inner - earth kingdom of Agarthi - described in the work of the author Willis George Emerson (1856 - 1918).

Emerson’s conceptualization was linked to the theory of “Terra Cava” (Hollow Earth), a very popular subject in the field of esotericism and literature, as expounded by Dante Alighieri, who allegedly descended amongst the chosen-few, in order to explore the underground kingdom, and receive its energy called VRYL. I have worked on the mystery of Bolsena and on its legends, investigating among reality and fantasy.

The work is based on the territory of Etruria that could be a point of passage, the "Door, of passage" towards something of indefinite and mysterious. The Etruscans considered the Bisentina island (situated in the middle of the lake) the spiritual heart of the entire Etruscan nation that guard their secrets. www.gianmarcosanna.com

Silvia De Giorgi

Jan 7

Jan 7 Silvia De Giorgi

Places of Passage (Isolation Diary) | This ongoing series is a personal record of real and imagined journeys undertaken since the COVID-19 outbreak in Winter/Spring 2020. It is composed of manipulated images from my photographic archive and pictures shot during a time of solitude and self-isolation spent between Norway, Sweden and Italy.

Images from my past photographic archive served as a starting point for imaginative journeys through my memories in a time of lock-down, becoming windows to distant places and landscapes. These photographs are combined with pictures of the surroundings I encountered during various periods of quarantine spent in different countries. Places of Passage examines opposed subjects such as stillness and movement, the inside and outside, and the domestic space as opposed to the wild and open environment. It is a poetic reflection on solitude, the rhythms of nature and the passage of time. silvia-degiorgi.com

Jan 4

Jan 4 Peter Basden

A Glancing Blow - From the Streets of the Medway Towns | A series of black and white photographs from the streets of the Medway towns. All of the images are from a project that I have been working on for around the last five years or so.

The work reveals a glimpse into the coarse underbelly of British society, highlighting little moments of unseen drama, flickers of humour and an eclectic mix of characters from a library of fleeting interactions caught on film. The photographs come from a dubious period of time in the United Kingdom, with a standing national divide over Brexit, widespread political turmoil and an unprecedented global pandemic looming in the background, optimism feels sparse.

As a collective, the work forms a dissection of uncontrolled, unposed life in Britain, presented through a plethora of snapshots and glancing blows.

For those unfamiliar with the Medway towns, the area is a conurbationin the region of South East England, in the United Kingdom. The towns surround the the mouth of the River Medway just before it empties into the Thames Estuary. Considered by some to be a deprived area in the garden of England, it sits just thirty miles away from the capital, sandwiched between London and some of Kent’s many famous coastal towns. The area celebrates its heritage through the naval dockyard in Chatham and as the historical home of Charles Dickens.

From the opposing ends of a single mile stretched between the towns of Rochester and Chatham, an interesting juxtaposition can be observed, with a medieval castle and a gothic cathedral partnered with quaint Dickensian themed boutiques at one end in Rochester, to the deteriorating remains of a once vibrant high street, now littered with boarded up shops and a sense of desperation in the contrasting area of Chatham.

I’m often very sentimental and nostalgic about Medway as it was the place where I was born and raised. In some ways, my work from this series is the result of me reevaluating the area as an adult. www.peterbasden.com

Dec 29

Dec 29 Peter Essick

Construction Sites | Three years ago, I was photographing an urban, old-growth forest near my home in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. I learned to use a drone during that commission to photograph the forest canopy and to show the close location of the forest to the downtown skyscrapers. The genesis of the Construction Sites series came on the half-hour drive to and from my home to the forest.

Along the drive, I saw many construction sites where neighborhoods were being converted to larger mixed-use developments. I thought that the low altitude aerial perspective from a drone would be a new way to document this change. I started by photographing the sites early in the morning or late in the afternoon when there was no work going on. This was mostly for safety reasons, but the light is also more to my liking at these times. I also wanted to emphasis the construction landscape without the workers.

At the start of the project, I noticed that construction sites change very rapidly. If I returned to a site one week later there were new visual opportunities as a result of the construction progress. Using a drone where flight time is limited by battery life, there are many quick visual decisions to be made. A small change in the angle can turn a straightforward workplace documentation into an Abstract Expressionist field of color. I enjoy this challenge and am drawn to the near-abstract qualities of the movement of soil and equipment as well as the technological side of how the concrete, steel and wood come together to create a structure.

Throughout my career, I have focused on nature and environmental subjects. I believe that construction sites are a good indicator for how a society views development, progress and the treatment of the environment. Many of the major environmental issues of our day - climate change, population and economic growth, forever chemicals and sustainability – are incorporated in the design of residential and commercial buildings. I see these temporary construction landscapes as visual metaphors for how we are choosing to create our future. www.peteressick.com

Valeria Laureano

Dec 23

Dec 23 Valeria Laureano

APICE | The photographic research reconstructs, through a mixture of archival portraits and current places, the story of the old town of Apice, partially evicted due to the earthquake in Irpinia in 1962 and then completely destroyed and abandoned after the second earthquake, in 1980.

Today what remains of Apice is the journey in images that the artist proposes, giving new life to spaces, once occupied by daily gestures and now full of memories. The work was elaborated from an archive of images found on site, consisting of a large number of negatives and glass sheets found on the back of a coffin shop, buried from the damp ground.

The photo archive offers a faithful portrait of the inhabitants of the village and alongside the current images of places and landscapes, gives identity to the village again.

The protagonists of Apice and their stories are imagined by the author in a very personal way. This means that the viewer can ideally and freely interpret them in a subjective way. So, the identity of Apice takes shape from the memory of its inhabitants.

A story in which time is no longer synonymous with destruction and abandonment but with creation and rebirth. Check out the Apice video | www.valerialaureano.com

Dec 21

Dec 21 Yasmine Hatimi

The New Romantics | It’s been some time now that i’ve wanted to talk about youth, and more specifically moroccan youth. The morocco of tomorrow will depend on the youth of today.

I started my project with a series I called “The New Romantics”. In this series of photographs, I present portraits of young men whom I ask to pose with flowers of their own choosing, and so, in a completely symbolic manner, I try to invoke sensitivity and romanticism where one would think it would not exist.

In realizing these portraits, I came to know a certain youth—a youth that thirsts for freedom and love, with a great sense of humor, a unique sense of style, and solidarity, but also a youth in distress. We are all subject to etiquette, to roles others have chosen for us, determined by our gender/sex, origins, culture or religion.

My idea to present men with flowers was also a way to address the stereotypes that imprison us, as woman or man and in certain societies more than others…I wanted to address this with a lot of levity, in a manner marked by playfulness and naivete.

It was important to me to reveal faces far from the clichés and the stereotypes , to discover a masculine youth that was diverse , not one with a single facet. The softness is there, one just has to look for it . www.yasminehatimi.com

Dec 17

Dec 17 Anton Talashka

Voice of the Belarusian Village | In the 21st century, globalization processes are moving at an incredibly fast pace. The problem of the extinction of villages worries the government not only of Belarus, but also of other developing countries. The population of the Belarusian village is declining: at the beginning of 1996, more than 3.2 million villagers lived in our country, then in 2016 - about 2.1 million. This problem is in many countries, but these processes in our country exacerbate economic problems in the villages.

Belarusian villages are dying, and every year there are fewer “survivors”. Together with the villages, the cultural code of Belarus is dying out: language, folk customs and crafts. But there are no breaks in culture, and culture is combined with the culture of other countries. The Belarusian nationality is losing its identity. The village is a source of culture and with every deceased resident of the village we become poorer ... And this poverty is the poverty of the soul. www.instagram.com/talashka_ph

Emilie Poiret-Brown

Dec 16

Dec 16 Emilie Poiret-Brown

Facture (2019) | My work lies on the boundary between photography and painting, seeking to challenge the notions of what a photograph is and how it is created. With conventional photography, the artist’s intervention takes place off the surface. In contrast, painting is valued on the artist’s personal expression which takes place simultaneously with a physical interaction between artist and surface. Cameraless processes allow me to interact directly with the surface and attempt to bring painting’s values to photography.

I have been inspired by painters, such as Yves Klein and Kazuo Shiraga, who use the human body in a physical connection with the materials and this physical connection is central to my work. Unlike conventional photography where the photographer’s body is distanced, my body is active in the mark-making, interacting physically with the photographic materials. I treat the light-sensitive surface as a canvas, using my body as a paintbrush. For me, the act of mark-making is a meditative act, a form of catharsis. It is this meditative process which dictates my gesture, often resulting in bold and expressive mark-making.

Although my interaction is closer to a painter’s, my work is still based within photography. Instead of paint and canvas, I use analogue processes and photographic light-sensitive materials. However, where photography normally involves strong control of materials, I misuse them utilising the photographic materials as creative components, to be handled in shaping the work. Rather than capturing a decisive moment, time frozen in an image, my work is a trace of its own creation. The process is not hidden but is made apparent through the chemical marks left on the surface, allowing an insight into the process of creation. My interaction with the surface is a private performance in which the viewer only has access to the aftermath, the trace of my gesture.

Cristina Rizzi Guelfi

Dec 14

Dec 14 Cristina Rizzi Guelfi

We Need a Face [?] | Selfies have become a storytelling tool, simple and immediate, but full of meaning. In an increasingly frenetic and immersive communication space, it is no coincidence that selfies have an increasingly important relevance. It is a kind of return to origins, made up of a representative language that is easy to use. Through selfies, in fact, you have the opportunity to show yourself to the world exactly in the way you want to be seen, or to make you perceive the sensations of a given moment only from the expression of the face, selecting precisely the information to be communicated.

The series "we need a face [?]" Was born to make fun of the widespread practice of obsession with selfies, replacing faces with photographs that were purchased from a bank of images. Most come from the US archives from the 1950s and 1960s. The question mark between the brackets is intended because it asks two questions: 1) Is it necessary to photograph your face? On the one hand, no, because body dysmorphism is a psychological disorder, typical of our society based on appearance and self-image, which causes in some individuals a continuous dissatisfaction and creates in the individual a conviction of having imaginary defects, related to your physical appearance, so much so that it becomes an obsession. 2) But without photographing the face, how can you understand the expression? This is why Arthur Schopenhauer's phrase "A person's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this person's thoughts and aspirations "

I’m reminded of a passage from Kate Zambreno’s novel, Green Girl: ‘Look at me / (don’t look at me) / Look at me / (don’t look at me) / Look at me don’t look at me look at me look at me don’t look at me don’t.’ It seems that however private we may be, we all struggle with a conflicted need for visibility, with a ‘being looked at’ we might both resent and crave. How do you negotiate your own need for privacy and solo practice versus public recognition?

Dec 10

Dec 10 Kevin Convery

A Bird Never Flew on One Wing | A bird never flew on one wing, a euphemism for ordering another drink, is a literal impossibility. Living with a substance abuse disorder while being employed as a bartender left me circling in a stasis asking the age old question, “Am I sad because I am drinking or am I drinking because I am sad?” I phoned my father to give him the news, “Sitting in the bar all day paid off. They offered me a job.” The following five years of perpetual nights I celebrated every birthday, holiday and milestone with a meter of wood and a wall of smoke between me and my loved ones. No matter good or bad there is always something to drink to. www.doorsareclosing.com

Dec 9

Dec 9 Lieh Sugai

Below The Big Top | The Culpepper & Merriweather Great Combined Circus is a traditional, nomadic one-ring family circus that lives on the road eight months out of the year.

Following a route through small towns, from the West Coast to mid-America, the close-knit troupe continues the tradition of the traveling circus. Unlike today’s overproduced theatrical mega-circuses, Culpepper & Merriweather brings together small-town communities in village-style events that many families visit year after year. These photographs explore the lives of the performers and the circus community at large, “under the tent” and on the road.

As a Japanese photographer living in America, I am interested in interrogating the cores of both of my cultures – cores that are permanent, unchanging, nostalgic, and in a mysterious way, true. Against the backdrop of our digital age, Culpepper & Merriweather represents an unchanging core in American culture, occupying a nostalgic space that persists alongside the mainstream. www.liehsugai.com