Naomi James

Lockdown Decay; All Our Landscapes Reimagined | All Our Landscapes reimagined is a Polaroid decay project carried out over the course of the three UK lockdowns.

I use a Polaroid SX-70 for much of my photographic work and at the start of the first lockdown, I selected a collection of images I had taken over the preceding months which reflected aspects of my everyday life. I placed sets of images in cleaning solutions- and contained them in boxes, just as, in a sense, we were to be. Polaroid decay is an unpredictable process which felt appropriate for the uncertain times in which we found ourselves.

As the life we knew disintegrated around us, the chemistry of the images altered. During a period when something microscopic had us in its grip, new landscapes with a cellular quality were created in their place. Sharply contrasting the devastating world news, a beauty was emerging- one I was also experiencing in my everyday life as the pace of my life altered and I became more aware of my surroundings.

I started removing the Polaroids and photographing them at key moments as restrictions were lifted. The first prints were taken out on May 13th with the initial easing of measures and the last set of the first series was removed on September 1st when I returned to work.

For the second lockdown, I took photographs of the beach huts at Wells in Norfolk whilst on holiday during the October half term. I knew restrictions were set to tighten again and for the first time heard the term ‘digital Christmas.’ The beach huts, once a symbol of vacations and freedom, suddenly symbolised another impending confinement. I chose to remove all the images on Christmas Day- the Polaroids taking the place of family members and friends I would not see.

During the second lockdown, I remained at work, but as the third was announced, I knew I would be working from home again. I looked to my immediate environment, recording the fabric of my surroundings in my images. Again, photographs were removed at each stage restrictions were lifted.

As life in Britain returns to the closest form of normality we have known for some time, we now hope and wait. As I reflect on this period and these images, I feel there will be elements of permanent change for me- a reimagining of my own landscapes. www.naomi-james.co.uk

Jillian Abir MacMaster

In Kid Years | In Kid Years is an exploration of the balance between frivolous play and the emotional complexity of children. As I photographed my girlfriend’s kids and the kids from our neighborhood more and more, I was witness to the turbulences of playtime, and learned what was most important to them in those moments. Every scratch, scrape, and bruise was indicative of fun.

I never considered myself to be “good with kids,” but as I developed this series, the worry that came with this inexperienced communication dissipated. The camera became the language of choice, and soon enough, the kids from across the park would come knocking on our door asking to be photographed. jillianmacmaster.com

Sue Palmer Stone

Embodiment — Salvaging a Self | This series represents a salvage operation: I retrieve something of value out of detritus and man-made cast-offs that would otherwise be lost or abandoned. It’s an effort to generate coherence and harmony in a dissonant, fragile, and precarious world.

Hunting for things to capture in neglected or beat-up spaces (a scrap metal yard, alleyway, construction site, behind a strip mall or pizzeria), I often haul items to new sites, or back to my studio, to work with them sculpturally and again photographically. Sometimes photographing them where I find them is enough, sometimes I have a slight hand in modeling or adjusting. These are “readymades” with occasional interventions.

The sculptures I create in my studio communicate obliquely and directly with what draws my attention in the outside world. They are vulnerable and alone, standing up tall, already collapsed, or somewhere in between.

I delight in making and connecting images that speak to each other through shape, color, line, texture, gesture, attitude and atmosphere, often playing with scale to emphasize or distort these relationships. While the objects themselves may carry a sense of loss, loneliness and abandonment, to me, these connections feel playful. www.suepalmerstone.com

Marilyn Boatwright

they get it honest | In 2019, I began taking photographs of my family when I was visiting them in Florida for the first time. When I returned to my own life in Boston, with the pictures I’d taken and handfuls of images plucked from scrapbooks, I began my current project. They get it honest focuses on my relationship with my family and what it means to return home.

As I worked on this series, I utilized multiple photographic processes like expired film and cyanotype to create a psychological space that addresses the complicated narratives of abuse, neglect, and addiction that I was coping with through therapy and finding myself retraumatized by in new relationships I developed away from home. When taken in as a whole the images make connections between memories, time, and how photography is a meditative practice to build my own personal space and identity. www.marilynjb.photo

Dineke Versluis

Bound | All kinds of obstacles attract me, both visually and physically. Walls, bars, fences, foliage. Feeling restricted makes me want to flee. I want to cross borders where I’m not allowed, to climb a fence, to ignore a stop sign, to trespass. I need to travel. To fly away and broaden my horizon. I have to question what’s holding me back. And don’t let others put a limit or a ceiling on my life.

Rotterdam-based photographer and visual artist Dineke Versluis is interested in the boundary between the public and the private self and turns a documentary lens on how people live, work and spend their leisure time. She is often drawn to situations and sites which are momentarily devoid of human activity, captured with an eye for symmetry and detail. dinekeversluis.nl

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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