portfolios — FLOAT

Aug 17

Aug 17 Lingxue Hao

After years of persistent insomnia, loss of interest in my surroundings, marked memory loss, physical pain without cause, unexplained heavy guilt, and erratic anxiety, I went to the hospital for psychiatric tests and was diagnosed with Major Depressive disorder. After going through two years of intermittent treatment, I did not heal, and my struggle intensified due to pressure from my family and their incomprehension of my disorder. As a way to cope with this predicament, I chose to pick up the camera and create a visual language to describe how I live with depression and its manifestations.

My experience with depression is multilayered, and my artistic investigation of it is both personal and challenging, but the goal of my work is never singular or self-centered. These photos represent the torment and pain I experienced as a patient with major depression, and also record the process of my constant struggle with it. What's more, it's a visual diary about a depressive patient that I created as a photographer using lens language. The process of shooting and editing this project is also the process by which I try to find a suitable way to communicate with the outside world and society. The purpose of my works is to help those who may be indirectly impacted by depression to understand mental illness more comprehensively and establish an accurate perspective on the patients. We live in a society where people still hold prejudices against those with mental illness and fail to understand it. My photos serve as a window so that viewers can better understand and offer a helping hand to their families and friends who suffer from the same pain around them. www.lunahao.com

Aug 16

Aug 16 Lisa Mukhina

Not Found | When I turned seventeen I left home. I wanted to know what it was like to be «an adult», but I returned a year later because I figured out that there is no such thing as a «proper adult». I realized that «propriety» was just a an imaginary figment, which we all try to materialize, unsuccessfully. I also realized that as individuals, we actually need other people, and each other, because we are all fundamentally lonely.

I realized that it was only my family that would always be there for me and help me. It is this realization that inspires this series of works. The themes that I tried to convey in this photoset are fear, youth, vulnerability and uncertainty, which grow into sincerity, perseverance, and strength. Simultaneously, the main theme of my work is forgiveness and love. The same love that I feel for my family, and the same forgiveness that I ask of my family, for not being sincere with them before. lisamukhinaph.ru

Aug 12

Aug 12 Ames LeeKing

Becomingness | In my photo series, Becomingness , I explore LGBTQIA experiences with vulnerability, bodies, gender, and race. As a non-binary queer person, I photograph people who are on a non-linear relationship with their bodies and what the world projects on to them. Representation of LGBTQIA people in fine art photography remains limited; my aim is to document and honor how we constantly become ourselves in a world that tries to confine us.

During the Pacific Northwest summertime, rivers are a destination, a sanctuary. A critical component of Becomingness is the one hour drive we take to the river together. Building a collaborative relationship with the person in the frame is crucial. It is important that I photograph them in the way they wish to be represented. At the river, we choose a quiet spot with few or no people. Solitude encourages the subject to breathe into themselves. As we explore the area, the photo session is a responding to and a seeing of the person in the environment, rather than directing or executing.

LGBTQIA lives, in our complexity and myriad ways of being, deserve to be documented and honored. Becoming into our bodies is a powerful act of survival and resistance. This is Becomingness .

Kenechi Unachukwu

Aug 11

Aug 11 Kenechi Unachukwu

Those Who Think Young | Those Who Think Young is a dive into both the iconic and overlooked places in the greater Madison, Wisconsin area using Pepsi signs as a proxy to investigate concepts such as the American Dream, desire, camaraderie, and isolation. Through the images, an attempt is made to answer the question of where these signs came from and why they are so prevalent; however the inevitable conclusion is that the signs are as much a part of the ecosystem of Madison and the surrounding areas as the locations that they are associated with. All images were taken on Ektar 100 film stock with a Nikon F3. www.kenechiuna.com

Vassilis Konstantinou

Aug 5

Aug 5 Vassilis Konstantinou

Pregnant Pauses | In “Pregnant Pauses” photography project, Vassilis Konstantinou captures moments of family and everyday routine, balancing between reality and fantasy. The stage heroes, members of his family and himself, sometimes give the impression of professional actors playing their part and sometimes they appear to portray themselves.

These Pauses imply an ambiguous “before” and an uncertain “after”. In a subtle manner, they attempt to perhaps illustrate the calm before the storm. Photographs standing still in blue, images encouraging the viewer to set them in motion, either in the future or in the past, ultimately revealing or hiding their secrets. www.vassiliskonstantinou.com

Aug 4

Aug 4 Azaan Shah

Hiraeth | This project is very personal and intimate to me , it started right after I moved to a new place which is quite far from the home where I was brought up. I have attachment to the old home and that area because I started as a photographer by walking the lanes of old city(downtown) so this project is about Homesickness and is very emotional for me.

Life is like earth moving on the axis. You keep moving yet you don’t dislocate. But some are not lucky enough to remain in their own nest forever. A home is a place; a space where longing rests and the soul gets peace. The more one is attached to this space of solace, the more painful is the feeling of being away from it.

The Welsh word ‘Hiraeth’ is an apt expression for such feelings of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness or desire for returning to places we have lost. Life keeps moving, like earth, and brings up new seasons. The rotation of life, from one nest to another, casts a flicker of dark and bright. A bird belongs to the nest yet flies high in the sky, a horse belongs to unending paths yet is tied to a cart, a seed has enough will to sprout even through rocks yet it is rooted deep down, a majestic tree aspires to kiss the heavens but is bound by earth, a man aspires infinitely yet is emotionally attached to his home. I too had my share of rotation. I am now somewhere else, not where I was brought up.

This feeling of homesickness both traps me as well as evokes in me a deep sense of being lost and lonely. The losing of home exemplifies for me the loss of self to the strange ambience of the new place, which offers me nothing except isolation. While my physical being tries hard to reconcile with this new reality my heart still dwells with those familiar faces of downtown and its spiritually soothing ambiance.

Jul 29

Jul 29 Alana Celii

Odd Sympathy | The notion of home exists within the realm of comfortable and familiar. It is often related to feelings of domesticity and cannot only represent a physical space but also time. The homely describes the sensation of when one feels at home but also can be defined as ugliness. Often, the true home is repressed and hidden through the guise of comfort or idealized perfection. However, when hidden details about the home are revealed, one experiences a sense of the uncanny. As a consequence of photographing, what was to remain secret about this environment has now been unearthed.

Through the exploration of my own personal moments, details that usually go unnoticed are uncovered. This minutia conveys the beauty in the forgotten and the ignored. It is the instance where everything feels foreign and familiar at the same time; thus resulting in the sensation of the uncomfortably strange. The eeriness and naiveté in the hope of the home is the underlying narrative within the imagery. alanacelii.com

Jul 28

Jul 28 Scott Brownell

Same Town, Different Place | I remember playing in the street, in the rain, while my mom sat on the porch with our neighbors chatting and gossiping about things going on in the town. It happened just about every other evening. Occasionally we would wander off to see our friends on their porch around the corner only to be met with a loud call to get back home. My mom raised four children without a father in a small town in Michigan. She came to rely on the neighbors to help watch us until we were old enough to watch ourselves.

At a point about three years ago, my interest started turning back to the beginnings, and to the things that inspired me at first. I have traveled back to my home town along with new places to photograph them and to explore how they maintain their stature in American life. I walk neighborhoods with a camera and talk to strangers. Sometimes I am passing through, and sometimes I am invited into their homes to have lunch. There is a simplicity on the surface but the details, landscape, and people of these smaller towns tell many stories. I am interested in how they lay life’s groundwork for the people who live there, as it did for me. www.scottbrownell.com

Jul 27

Jul 27 Vitor Mazon

Chaos | In many creation myths, from the Judeo-Christian tradition to tales from the Philippines and Latin America, water has a significant importance as a force of nature that existed before creation itself. It is from these dark waters that many gods and consequently all forms of life emerge. At the same time, these myths also relate to the theories of evolution that propose that all life arose from the sea.

Taking these ideas of the universal aspects of mythology and scientific theories, the series "Chaos" was born, which compose a larger work, still under development, in which I seek a way to (re)create a connection with the natural world that is not filtered by liberal, western and anthropocentric optics. I try to build a narrative, which starts from the ancient mythologies, but does not exclude understandings of science that constitute the great history of the cosmos. www.vitormazon.com

Soledad Borches

Jul 26

Jul 26 Soledad Borches

Days 2020 | Moments of stillness, moments of silence, lights like flashes, time without time, reality suspended. Fears. Is this a nightmare?
Uncertainty.
Nothing.

The images evoke moments and sensations from the days that I lived with my children during the quarantine decreed in Argentina on March 20, 2020, for almost 8 months. It was a time of deep sensitivity full of fears and insecurities. Those days I embraced photography like a medium to canalize all those confused feelings, all the surrounding little things caught my attention and of course I saw how son and baby grow up inside home and me with them.

I’m an Argentine photographer, currently living in Buenos Aires, who more than dedicate myself to photography I am interested in the image in a broad sense, as a language. In my works, the sociocultural, collective and individual memory prevail. Through the images I seek to build the story, many times I start a series without being clear about where I want to go, I let myself be carried away by intuition and embrace the different ways of being of the images through experimentation.

My nature is dual, in it introspection and extrospection coexist. The image is a means to know and rethink my personal history, through it I write my identity, I observe myself. Also, through it I reconstruct social history and connect with other existences, especially through portraits. The act of photographing becomes full when it is felt in the body, when "something" makes it vibrate.

Marcelo Schellini

Jul 22

Jul 22 Marcelo Schellini

Tarikh al-Brasil | History of Brazil | Tarikh al-Brasil can be translated from Arabic as History of Brazil and is a visual research on the visibility/invisibility of Muslims of African origin in Brazilian history and society. With more than four hundred years of presence in Brazil, African Muslims first arrived in the Americas through the slave trade and, although enslaved, yielded an expressive cultural and social influence that triggered numerous freedom revolts, being the Malês uprising of 1835 their best known historical chapter.

The present photo essay is a reflection on the possibilities of seeing/reviewing through a photographic practice that drives the image to the limit between the document and the invention. The photographs also convey the author’s engagement, himself a reverted Muslim, in his ten years as an active member of the largest community of African Muslims today in Brazil and its struggle to overcome social negligence and underrepresentation. marceloschellini.com.br

Maja Strgar Kurecic

Jul 12

Jul 12 Maja Strgar Kurecic

Floating Garden | I started the Floating Garden series in the summer of 2019. It all began with a single rose. The rose my daughter received for her 18th birthday. This rose prompted me to think about youth, beauty, transience… It brings about the awareness of the inevitability of the end. The mere look at the rose and, quite surely, the thought that my daughter was growing up, drove me to preserve that rose from deterioration, to safeguard its youth. So, without much planning and thinking, I put it in the water and iced it.

After a while, it came to me how to shoot it in order to emphasize the delicate structure of the petals and maintain its natural color. In addition to rose petals, I began experimenting with other flowers, leaves, twigs, grasses, seeds - everything I would find in my garden. I secluded myself with my “treasure” in the children’s room where I submerged it under water in a simple glass bowl, the same one I use for making Sunday lunch. Thus, submerged and illuminated by a desk lamp I began with its transformation. The created images are an ode to the organic, elemental life, as well as an ode to everyday life – not the public one, but quite opposite the most private and intimate one. majastrgarkurecic.com

Mahdiyeh Afshar

Jul 8

Jul 8 Mahdiyeh Afshar

Showing emotion with your body is hard sometimes. we always show human’s feelings with their bodies and their faces . we think that objects don’t have feeling . I want to connect these two world . I Try To Make A New Space With High Contrast. I Try To Break The Law By Creating A Weird Environment Which Reflects On My Feeling.

It Was Hard The First Time Because I Have To Change It Regardless Whether I Like It Or Not. But After A While I Realize Art Means Changing What It Is And Making A New Thing mahdiyehafshar.com

Jul 7

Jul 7 Vitaly Severov

Summer Shore | Summer Shore is the geographical name of the coastal area of the White Sea and standing opposite the Winter Shore.That names gave by ethnic people of White Sea - pomors, who are lived there for centuries, which trade with Norway and living by sea. This book has the same title — «Summer Shore» and represent my journeys there and nostalgia feelings of my childhood which spend there, in a small point -Severodvinsk city.

In this series, I try to understand how memories affect perception. The book is made as a harmonica scroll, placed in a clear plastic audiocassette case. This form conveys the idea of time, rhythm and continuity of music. The book has linear narrative that unfolds itself through the recurring images of light. I remember our home, windows were facing west. Every evening, before plunging into darkness, the sun threw the last beams of light through the windows. Where the sun was setting, the coast disappeared behind the horizon. That world left me only memories and few things. But the shore is still there and I‘ve been dreaming about traveling there. vitalyseverov.com

Joshua Cavalier

Jul 6

Jul 6 Joshua Cavalier

He asked if I was looking for God | Beauty requires a witness — an observer to organize the chaos of the material world into arrangements of aesthetics and goodness. From life’s most mechanical experiences, the conscious observer composes meaning. We learn from mistakes and mistrials. Failures and accidents become stencils around which we trace new futures. Friendships and lovers come and go, and are the punctuation marks that give our sentences weight and power.

Like the accident of shapes and colors that struck the sidewalk of the park that day, the circumstances of our lives occasionally line up for a marvelous instant and allow us — ever so briefly — to commune with true wonder. Thanks to my camera, I find that even the smallest of coincidences appears marvelous still. Everything beautiful is at least in some part an accident. joshuacavalier.com

Mendia Echeverria

Jun 28

Jun 28 Mendia Echeverria

Cartographie Éphémère | On January 7, 2019, I entered the Bois de Vincennes for the first time and discovered Le Grand Rocher. Memory, footprint, nature and landscape are the concepts that give meaning to this book. All of them surround the forest, mixing time and space articulated around a rock that limits the empty space and returns it converted into changing and suggestive images of parallel realities. The rock stands almost omnipresent throughout the entire forest, above the urban landscape and that delimited by the Bois de Vincennes itself.

The Bois de Vincennes and the Grand Rocher dialogue until they meet, establishing a theoretical and visual reflection on the social and photographic construction of memory. One of the main objectives of the research is to obtain and form a trace, both past and current, of the photographed place, which is constantly evolving. The set of images already processed in their final form allows an attempt to recover the memory of physical space, as well as the formation of an almost sensory imprint that is modified by the passage of time. www.mendiaecheverria.com

Willy Vecchiato

Jun 24

Jun 24 Willy Vecchiato

Lanzarote | Lanzarote is a hymn to the founding elements of the earth, the raison d'être of the senses on which the fragile human intentions rest. Like ancient wills carved on stone. Lanzarote is an epistème and together it traces the same duration of the primordial substance. Life, in which sacred and profane mingle in a dream of eternity.

Willy Vecchiato's photograph is black and white. Visceral, absolute and not at all reassuring. He scraps reality in a damnably poetic way. An intruder who moves between the folds of seeing to free all the slags and the annoying or uncomfortable meanings.’ Steve Bisson In December 2019 he published his first book, Lanzarote, for Penisola edizioni. www.willyvecchiato.com

Jun 22

Jun 22 Hannah Altman

Jewish thought suggests that the memory of an action is as primary as the action itself. This is to say that when my hand is wounded, I remember other hands. I trace ache back to other aches - my mother grabbing my wrist pulling me across the intersection, my great-grandmother’s fingers numb on the ship headed towards Cuba fleeing the Nazis, Miriam’s palms pouring water for the Hebrews in the desert - this is how a Jew understands action.

Because no physical space is a given for the Jewish diaspora, time and the rituals that steep into it are centered as a mode of carrying on. The bloodline of a folktale, an object, a ritual, pulses through interpretation and enactment. In this work I explore notions of Jewish memory, narrative heirlooms, and image making; the works position themselves in the past as memories, in the present as stories being told, and in the future as actions to interpret and repeat. To approach an image in this way is not only to ask what it looks like but asks: what does it remember like? www.hannahaltmanphoto.com

Jun 21

Jun 21 Vibhav Kapoor

टहलने की दास्तान (a story of meandering) | These photographs are a selection from an ongoing body of work called टहलने की दास्तान (a story of meandering). They have been made on improvised wanderings around my hometown of Gurgaon in the Delhi region of India. Observed in between nature and the built environment about the mystery and memory of places deciphering ontological obscurity. https://vibhavkapoor.com

Alejandra Vacuii

Jun 18

Jun 18 Alejandra Vacuii

La Mala Fortuna | "La Mala Fortuna" is a photo project about an internal search. In the wake of an identity crisis that manifested itself through strong anxiety, I began to ask myself questions about my place in the world and the true nature of my sensitivity.

It was through my approach to photography that I managed to channel in a productive way the sensations that my permanent state of alertness has made me suffer. Trying to investigate the reasons for my psychological state, I began to take photos guided by a need to reveal myself to the world, in order to reveal myself. A very instinctive process, not very rational, somewhat visceral. It is in melancholy, anguish, boredom, nostalgia (for the past and future) and boredom where the photographs of this project are reflected

Each photograph works as a microcosm that works both alone and together. Sometimes thought (almost never), sometimes found (almost always), they inhabit a place between found reality and idealized reality, like visual poems where the meaning is never clear and a space is established for imagination and also for reflection. . I keep asking myself unanswered questions about the world around me and my position in it and it is these images that I get in response. "La Mala Fortuna" is the universe that I have created to be able to explain myself to the world. www.alejandravacuii.com