portfolios — FLOAT

Julia Vandenoever

Mar 24

Mar 24 Julia Vandenoever

Still Breathing | Losing all family left me feeling alone and ungrounded. The year my mother died from cancer, I also lost my brother to a life of addiction. The people who knew me longest were suddenly gone. Our small family of three went to one marking the end of my family of origin.

Grief is a strange cocktail of emotions and it swallowed me. From cravings to wear all my mom’s handmade sweaters all at once in order to inhale her smell to hours of uncontrollable angry crying fits about words gone unsaid. I did not want to forget and I could not let go. I collected everything in her house I could from handwriting on scraps of paper, birthday cards, old perfume bottles to used tissues in pockets - the only pieces of my childhood left.

As I was swimming in grief, my own two children were growing up. Their gestures and experiences illuminated the fragility and duality of childhood - with every step of growth there is a loss. Observing their childhood transported me back to my own. I saw myself back in these moments with my mom and brother. I threaded together our two childhoods to preserve both theirs and mine. By recreating my memories, I put my family of origin back together again.

Still Breathing is a meditation on loss and remembering. Distilling the chaos was a healing process for me. I told my mom that she would not be forgotten. Still Breathing is my promise. www.juliavandenoever.com

Mariia Ermolenko

Mar 23

Mar 23 Mariia Ermolenko

Camouflage | I am inspired by how snow and fog change space. They dissolve everything without a trace. Hidden from our eyes, people, cities and animals seem to be protected from danger. When forests burn down and whole species of animals become extinct, I try to figure out how I could protect them. In the project, I enwrap in smoke, shroud, hide natural objects that seem vulnerable to me.
Now I think about protection.

I think about mimicry. Only a few species of animals and plants are capable of such transformation. What if everyone could protect themselves with adaptable coloring? I fill the snow-white space with awareness and diligence, like Japanese engravers, leaving only outlines and hints. As if running with an ink pen on a white sheet, I examine the fillability of emptiness.

Objects merge with the world, and we no longer notice them. We leave them alone. mariiaermolenko.com

Mar 22

Mar 22 David Barreiro

An Inventory of Gaps | An Inventory of Gaps is a collaborative photo-book by Lucy Holt and David Barrerio. It was edited by Rut Blees Luxemburg and designed by Bakhtawer Haider and Magda Tritto and published by FOLIUM as part of the Royal College of Art’s Future Archive project. Having closely observed the construction of the new RCA building at Battersea over a series of site visits, participants of the project were invited to respond to the site in their practice. An Inventory of gaps is one such response. Combining images and text, the work looks at the ever-shifting nature of construction sites, which are often perceived as simply voids or holding spaces, looking closely at the poetry of the taps, textures and movements contained within. www.davidbarreiro.com

Mar 18

Mar 18 Michael Snyder

THE ANCIENTS | Trapped in my home for a year during the time of the pandemic, I took to long walks through the forest at midnight, when no one else was around. On these quiet escapes through field and fen, I found myself struck by the conspicuous fact that, throughout it all, here in the patient indifference of night, the trees, and the stream, and the little moth in pursuit of her moon, these things remain; they quietly endure. Confined to our boxes and lost in the mist of our own misfortunes, it has become easy to forget that out here, even in the depths of winter at night, we are surrounded and carried by innumerable beings and relentless forces far more ancient and awesome than we.

Mar 17

Mar 17 Sylvain Biard

BADLANDS | My grandmother was buried in the cemetery of a small french village. That morning the white sky fell into confusion with the mists. Color had disappeared. She's here now surrounded by these roads while somewhere in family albums, one finds her presence in her father’s photographs. www.twennys.com

Mar 16

Mar 16 Mady Lykeridou

The island that takes me on journeys | I arrived on the island of Milos 18 years ago(2002). The search for the essence of the world, leads me to photograph every day everything that surrounds me on a piece of land edged between sea and sky.
150.6 km²
"Trapped" in paradise.
Born to travel.
Photography is the medium that allows me to travel as frequently as I need.

Everyday scenes under the Cycladic light, of a fleeting world in which every detail is related to the concept of birth, of transformation of life and death. Light, shadows and shapes which carry me back and forth in time. A green sea, a Venus appearing in my shadow, insects dying slowly …
Everything I look at, discover and become on the island. www.madylykeridou.com

Mar 15

Mar 15 Birgit Buchart

Space Available | Space Available is documenting the current economic state of Manhattan's richest and most luxurious neighborhoods.

One afternoon late September, after my first visit to the MET since February, I walked down Madison Avenue and found myself in an overwhelmingly melancholic mood taking photos of all the empty spaces, which in the beginning of this year were still proudly displaying the wealthy and glamorous lifestyle of the Upper East Side.

I continued this series over the following week in Midtown and the West Village. By doing so, it became clear to me that this project was not only a matter of the documentation of an economic crisis but also a creative way to finally capture this strange, new, scary and sad feeling, I could never quite grasp or explain but have been carrying inside myself since March. The sudden emptiness, the distorted reflections of the "(new) normal life", the masks, the self-reflecting, the strong contrasts –– it has been a big mess, an emotional chaos, and so feels this series of reflections and contrasting worlds colliding. www.birgitbuchart.com

Lee-Marie Sadek

Mar 10

Mar 10 Lee-Marie Sadek

William Mark Sommer

Mar 8

Mar 8 William Mark Sommer

The Loneliest Highway | The empty stretch of road goes on for miles, nothing but the occasional sign or the passerby as the pavement beneath my tires breathes the melody of past motorists. The Loneliest Highway is my lyrical journey across Nevada finding solace in the emptiness along the Lincoln Highway in the wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic. This melancholy song is driven by the feelings of isolation that conveys the essence of the stay at home orders and the loneliness that came in seclusion afterward. Through these discoveries in loneliness along the road I was able to develop catharsis of the moment and empowerment to show this current time. Along this lonely road the lines move like a day in wait as I pass through the forgotten towns that align the highway, nothing to be said or heard but the whispers of what came before and a hope in betterment of tomorrow. www.williammarksommer.com

Mathias Strømfeldt

Mar 2

Mar 2 Mathias Strømfeldt

I always work with an immediate approach and let the motives arise. Street photography is a poor term, but nonetheless a genre that embraces the idea of capturing the moment. And my whole photographic journey is about capturing the moments that touches something in me. I know right away if I am gravitated to a motive or not. I photograph for my own enthusiasm. The basic idea of the isolated moment, which only happens once, motivates me. Therefore the analog medium is also my favourite. The nerve that is ingrained in pressing the shutter and waiting patiently for the development of the rewarding feeling and situation is fundamental. I do not want to manipulate or construct, but rather document. It should be the raw rendering or none at all.

This series is a visualization, of my first encounter with the country of Japan. It was photographed during the journey from Osaka in the west to Tokyo in the east, 2017. I observe and encapsulate moments, often with an observant distance. I do not imagine that I can capture a culture with my photographs, but I experience and try to understand through my camera. There is always an interplay between human beings and their environment. For me, it's about context and contrast. To frame the small stories that unfold in the larger tangle. It's a special thing, because I react to what catches my eye and it's really a very personal thing. It's just important to me that every single picture opens the door ajar for a story and that it leaves a feeling.
Besides my unreserved fascination and infatuation with the country. The journey left me with a sense of a complex symbiosis between calm and tensity. www.mathiasstromfeldt.com

Solenne Spitalier

Feb 24

Feb 24 Solenne Spitalier

Wide Open | In ‘Wide Open’, Solenne Spitalier creates a world that is familiar yet disorientating. Examining themes of longing, touch, and care, her quiet images amplify and unravel mundane moments that become a site for healing and intimacy. Memory, trauma, and reconstruction of childhood have informed her approach to making these photographs, searching to make visible the disillusionment with what is expected early on and what is given, and the self-destructive tendencies that hold us back from accepting care.

The emotional and physical are intertwined to create a potent search for freedom. A recurring glow and warm colors are juxtaposed with flatter lighting and cooler tones. They work together to create a tension between moments of contact and moments of isolation. www.solennespitalier.com

Feb 15

Feb 15 Juan Sánchez

PANADELLA | When a road disappears, what happens to the place it leads to? Does it get lost or does it continue to exist? Does it become a corpse, a memory, a new place, or everything at once?

"Panadella", which means "place to stop", explores an old enclave of services to the traveler that was very successful in the past. Located on a road that for years was a main one, it currently remains on a secondary highway as a living cultural vestige.

The series shows the pulse of a place against what seems inevitable. It investigates the existential tension and the dissolution of a place that has lost its status and its identity because of being displaced by technology. "Panadella" delves into a charismatic location from a supposedly extinct era that nevertheless survives on the outskirts. www.sanchezsanchez.net

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.