WALL DONE MAGAZINE

DRAMA KING

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:00:00 0

Guy Bourdin's fashion photography was dark, theatrical and disturbing. While he was considered one of the coolest photographers of his time, he refused to have his work celebrated.

Guy Bourdin probably never meant for his photographs to be seen on magazine pages again. Throughout his career, spanning three decades, he created thousands of images for French Vogue and advertising campaigns and yet saved almost nothing for posterity. So even before his death of cancer in 1991, you could be forgiven for asking, 'Guy who?'

In the Sixties and Seventies, Guy Bourdin, was the coolest photographer in Paris – then regarded as a cultural hotspot. But unlike his contemporaries, who revelled in their burgeoning rock-star status, he ducked away from the limelight and continually turned down offers to exhibit or compile a book of his photographs.

Although Bourdin worked as a fashion photographer, his pictures were never just about clothes. They were incidents, troubling scenes from movies never made. The women populating his images were characterized by their flawless pallor and make-up (originally inspired by Bourdin's mother) that resembles an over-zealous mortician, all livid pink blush and three-dimensional lipgloss. The clothes were almost incidental to the drama.

There is nothing straightforward about Bourdin's work. Emma Soames entered his orbit working for French Vogue in 1971 and found herself keeping track of two Andy Warhol models running amok outside the French Parliament in nothing but high heels. 'He caused havoc but we adored him,' she asserts. 'Working with him was a real adventure.' Such escapades could involve anything from transporting a reeking tuna halfway across France to complete one of Bourdin's scenarios, scouring Paris for a wall made of 'the right kind of bricks' to comply with his specific demands.

His models also required a healthy sense of adventure. 'It really went beyond being a pretty girl,' stylist Grace Coddington once commented. Bourdin tended to avoid professional models, as his one-time assistant Icaro Kosak recalls. 'He'd look at a girl and think, "Will she go all the way?" Not sexually, but "Will she hang from the ceiling with five bags of ice in her pockets?"

Guy's studio down the dingy Rue des Ecouffe in the Marais district of Paris was an ideal playing field for these games. A dungeon-like warehouse, it had no telephone and a toilet accessible only by walking along precarious wooden planks. When Kosak started working for Bourdin in 1975, Guy didn't speak to him directly for three months. Only when Kosak was about to topple off a stepladder screaming 'Help!' did Bourdin respond: 'Icar, a good assistant never asks for help.'

Kosak quickly realized that Bourdin's skill in the studio was as much psychological as it was technical: 'He would create a situation which forced three or four people who couldn't stand each other into a confined space for 12 hours, and observe how the whole thing would slowly, slowly get out of hand.'

So keen was he on cultivating tensions between the assembled models, make-up artists, and fashion editors, he once suggested to Kosak that they line the walls of the tiny make-up room with copper mesh so not one spark of the electric atmosphere that built up could escape.

Bourdin was never one to shy away from life's dark side. For his first commission for Vogue, he photographed a model in a graceful net-veiled hat in front of a butcher's market stall - five-spectral looking calves' heads hanging from hooks above her, their five wan tongues lolling. He came to enjoy complete control over his Vogue pictures; the magazine's support for him became so unequivocal that reputedly staff would go into ecstasies over a Bourdin photograph before they had set eyes on it.

Joining the dots between his arresting pictures and his private life, Bourdin is often referred to as a misogynist puppet-master. The suicide of his second wife Sybille Dallmer, completes this sketchy image. Before her death Dallmer devoted herself to organizing Bourdin's business affairs so exclusively that by the end she rarely left the fifth floor apartment they shared. Following the tragedy, 'He surrounded himself with the wrong people. It was like tempting the devil,' Says Kosak, who remained a friend until Bourdin's death.

During his life Bourdin liked to get his own way. Once when he was refused entrance to a nightclub, he tore his clothes off and cried, 'If I can't get in then my clothes will!' With all this can-do energy channeled into his high-voltage images, it is no surprise that his photographs have survived him. Even against his will. —Naomi West

On display from February 02, 2012 till March 10, 2012 at Michael Hoppen Gallery. The exclusive representative of the Estate of Guy Bourdin.

All images © Guy Bourdin

SEVEN ROOMS

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:00:00 0

The plan was pretty straightforward. To go to Russia and create a broad and complex story describing the condition of the contemporary country with all its little things and most importantly, the whole generation of young, troubled people in the middle of transformation. After three years of work he realized that the task might be little bit more demanding than he initially expected. Instead of trying to comprehend the problem with all its nuances, he focused on everyday lives of - as he described - usual residents. I'm glad he did.

A short excerpt by Liza Faktor:

Why does a photographer, or anyone with an ability to create narrative, gets drawn to a certain geographical territory to the point that he spends years in and out and most of his income to look at it at a close proximity? The sense of belonging, probably?

He doesn't have to like it or even come to understand the place, but he has to love it and all that comes with it: its people, food, drunkenness, taxi music and landscape.

Rafal Milach has been haunted by Russia and its 7 people. He spent six years with those people in 3 cities: Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk. In their 30s, they are intermediates between the ineradicable Soviet mentality and the increasingly anxious Russian mind of today.

Milach's search is the kind which is almost impossible to visualize. And yet, what he has here, in this book, is a fascinating and subtle journey into the loss of direction, into the sad and beautiful connection with our country.

You would be surprised that in all the richness of the Russian language, where there is a separate word for everything, the word 'country' means both the territory and the government…

The book was published by Kehrer Verlag, has 152 pages and 57 pictures. It has a killer design by Ania Nałęcka. All interviews were conducted by the author himself. Texts by Svetlana Alexievich. It is available in English and Russian and as a special, signed and numbered, limited edition of 100. Comes with a signed print of your choice!

All images © Rafał Milach

BUILDING BRASILIA

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 0

Marcel Gautherot, the ideal architectural photographer, made an epic undertaking in the late 1950s – photographing every step of the construction of the city of Brasilia, from untouched grassland to modern capital.

Gautherot photographed not only every stage of construction, but also the faces and homes of the workers. The result is a monumental and radical photo essay on this triumph of urban planning and architecture.

  Gautherot had studied architecture and design, and was influenced by Le Corbusier and other modernists as well as the political radicalism of the period. Postwar, he devoted his life to travel and photography, taking with him the formal rigour of modernism and also a sympathy for ordinary people.

  Moving to Brazil in 1940, he forged many friendships, most notably with Oscar Niemeyer, the chief architect of Brasilia, becoming Niemeyer’s photographer of choice.

For the first time, the photographs are collected to form a portfolio of Gautherot’s work in Brasilia, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the city’s inauguration.

All images © Marcel Gautherot

THE TIME MACHINE

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 0

The Time Machine is a body of previously unseen works, shot across Portugal between 2010 and 2011. Structured as a topographic survey of hydropower plants, built between the 1950's and 1970's, the work recovers a past of exciting technological innovation and optimistic belief in the future. It records spaces and objects that characterise a suspended time, that of the modern: machines and rooms which simultaneously place us in genuine science-fiction settings and in an unavoidable field of nostalgia. Because the future announced there is here now; and now we know that nothing has happened in the way that the ideological narrative of the modern wanted us to believe that it would.

No more than half a dozen people, including specialists and cleaning and security staff, run places which, in some cases, were intended to house up to 250 workers just fifty years ago. These people and their families were intended to live in real villages, hubs of population and urban development in a future which, today, has ultimately emerged as uninhabited.

At each dam, the automating of the machines has alienated the concrete and immediate power by which reality is governed and concentrated the control of a complex hydroelectric system in a distant centre, lending consistency to the possibility of fictionalising the controlling of man by machines which he himself created.

What can now be considered as false expectations of the future, or broken promises, stems from projects that were conceived when man and machine formed part of the same future, when the particular submitted to the universal. The work alludes to the paradox of this impossibility and his images are a testimony of the link that has been broken.

List of works (in order of appearance):

1 Alto Lindoso power station: instrument transformer cell in the busbar gallery (alternating-current generator floor)
2 Alto Rabagão power station: waiting room,
3 Miranda power station: machine hall,
4 Miranda power station: office,
5 Alto Rabagão power station: busbar shaft (view from the machine hall),
6 Lindoso power station: control room (frontal view),
7 Fratel power station: machine hall,
8 Caldeirão Dam: water intake tower for hydraulic circuit, ,
9 Alto Rabagão power station: meeting room,
10 Picote power station: emergency diesel generating set.

All images from the series, The Time Machine 2011  © Edgar Martins

This project was funded by the EDP Foundation

'He'd look at a girl and think, "Will she go all the way?" Not sexually, but "Will she hang from the ceiling with five bags of ice in her pockets?"

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:00:00 0

THE WAITING GAME

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 0

We've met Txema two months ago at Spéos during the Open Portfolio Night, part of Lens Culture FotoFest in Paris. A young gentleman with short beard, wearing beige jacket seemed to be quite satisfied with small crowd of reviewers and observers gathering around the table where he was carefully rearranging prints from his The Waiting Game project.

For over four years, disguised as a road-worker with yellow reflective vest, yellow tripod and blue helmet he was photographing girls working as prostitutes along the Mediterranean highway from Catalunya to Andalucia. The fact that he was using a large format Cambo made them believe that it's an instrument used by surveyors to transfer, measure, or set horizontal levels, making it possible to blend in and take pictures unnoticed.

All images © Txema Salvans

CENSORSHIP IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 0

...so is this act. Take action.

http://en.wikipedia.org/
http://wordpress.org/
http://boingboing.net/
http://www.reddit.com/
http://www.minecraft.net/
http://wired.com/
http://theoatmeal.com/

Image © Helmut Newton

SCARRED FOR LIFE

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 0

California, place where I wouldn't mind spending this weekend will soon become crowded with photography enthusiasts seeing that Photo LA is about to start its 21st edition January 12 - 16, 2012. Photographer Klaus Pichler or to be exact, his images from the 'Skeletons in the Closet' series, get to be temporary residents right at the Galerie OPEN booth.

Meanwhile at Wall Done we're having a closer look at his new book 'Fürs Leben gezeichnet' and the world full of teardrops and spider webs. Thanks Julie.

Tattooing mainly used to be common amongst sailors and prisoners. That's why people used to say they'd been out at sea when they'd been in prison really. Obviously no one believed them. If somebody was covered in tattoos people knew he'd been in prison. It was imprinted in people's minds, tattoos equals criminal, especially amongst the older generation. You could also tell by the way they were done and there was a certain type of pictures which was only done in prisons. Three dots between the thumb and index finger, a cross, Che Guevara, a dot on the face, a spider's web, women's names or a bunch of grapes. All these used to be typical prison tattoos.

Mr. V., 51 years

Traditionally tattooing used to be mainly for people from the prison scene, nowadays it is trendy everywhere. I'd say if you compare modern day tattooing to the old tradition, many people just feel very important nowadays. It never just used to be a tradition, you know, but it was also a sign of being part of a criminal culture. Everybody who got put away for a while just had to have some done. Well, you didn't exactly have to, if you didn't want to do it you didn't do it, but nearly everyone had some done. Criminals were criminals and they were tattooed. That was it. We were outsiders and with our tattoos we made a promise not to join the mainstream.
Mr. L., 63 years

There was no way of stopping people having tattoos done in prison, not even back in the 70's when we weren't allowed ink and needles weren't available. We just made all the stuff ourselves. The colour was made by cutting a piece off the rubber sole of our prison shoes, burning it and covering it with a tin bowl which created a layer of soot on top. We mixed the soot with toothpaste or shampoo. The red colour was made using brick dust which we scraped off the prison walls. Our needles were usually sharpened paper clips, pieces of wire or guitar strings.
Mr. J., 57 years

All images © Klaus Pichler

THE GREAT UNREAL

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:00:00 0

What images represent typically American sceneries? The starting point for the photo series 'The Great Unreal', a project on which the two photographers from Zurich worked from 2005 to 2009, was a scholarship from the City of Zurich. This scholarship allowed the two men to work in New York for a year. From New York, they made numerous trips through the country. Fascinated by the seemingly endless landscapes, they strove to connect the mythological 'America' pictures in our heads with the everyday images that they encountered on the roadside.

Nico Krebs and Taiyo Onorato, who completed their degree in photography at the ZHdK in 2005 and who have been working together since 2003, built models and used illusion tricks of the type known from Hollywood movies. In the background of one photograph, caravans can be seen, loosely grouped to form a settlement, and next to them giant cacti, palm trees and telephone masts. A typical 'American' picture bathed in atmospheric light of the type we seem to recall from films. But in the foreground, there is a gaping abyss which fills the entire lower quarter of the picture ('Abyss').

In addition to such fabricated images, in which reality is combined with models, the photographer duo has decided to also include a series of 'straight' images which are not 'faked' in any way. The effect is astounding: all of a sudden, one does not trust the 'real' pictures anymore, thinks that they too are artificial and fabricated, and this is what the title 'The Great Unreal' alludes to.

A highway weaving its way through several rolling hills seems to stretch out into the barren landscape endlessly ('Map'): is this how the view presented itself to the photographers, or did they construct it as a model? In some pictures, the duo reveals its trick box: the model of a country road is seen sitting on a tripod in front of a mountainous country road. Viewers experience particular pleasure when the photographers thus reveal their playful approach to reality and fiction.

The photography book 'The Great Unreal' was published by Edition Patrick Frey in 2009.

—Peter Stohler

All images © Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs

what he found in the forest

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:00:00 0

Anna Orłowska is Poland based photographer, whose works were presented in prestigious album ReGeneration2 which focuses on the World's rising stars of artistic photography.

Anna constructs photographic cycles which pretend to be narrative stories. The viewer at first glance, evaluate them as a coherent sequence which has its storyline, but the author herself says: "in my series [...] one seek for the storyline (and they have a problem because nothing there is arranged orderly) instead of focusing on individual images and then combine them into the complete plot."

Her pictures are in various degrees staged: sometimes the place, photographed person, clothing etc. everything is planned and prepared by Anna but sometimes only a part of each photograph is planned and the rest is a matter of luck. In her cycles she also smuggles "real" images - the ones which simply records the world around her.

About her series entitled "What he found in the forest" she writes: "The hero during his monotonous daily journeys by car, sees images that trace the strange and unusual situation. By combining parts together he arranges his own versions of events, which eventually becomes the only story on himself."

--

For those of you living in our one-of-a-kind, beautiful city... Anna is having an exhibition called Leakage starting 08.12.2011 at 7:00PM, CK Agora/Serbska 5a. It would be unwise to miss such an opportunity.

All images @ Anna Orłowska

PARASOMNIA

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:00:00 0

I saw this image a while ago. It stunned me with it's play of light and shadow. It was mighty and very dreamlike. Both at the same time. I was carrying it with me until I knew where did it come from. Then it grew on me and became permanent resident.

--

Viviane Sassen (Dutch, born 1972) studied fashion design and photography before receiving an MFA from Ateliers Arnhem, the Netherlands. Some of her earliest memories are of life in Kenya, where she spent three years as a child. When her family returned to the Netherlands in 1978, Sassen was troubled: "I didn't feel like I belonged in Europe, and yet I knew I was a foreigner in Africa," she says. Ten years later, at age sixteen, Sassen revisited Kenya, and she has been traveling and working in Africa ever since. She made Parasomnia, her newest body of work, in a number of intentionally unidentified African countries, featuring anonymous subjects. Parasomnia is a category of sleep disorder whose symptoms include abnormal dreams, nightmares, and sleepwalking. In the surreal pictures in this installation, Sassen invites viewers to follow her on a journey through the mysterious remnants of her memories.

All images © Viviane Sassen

SENTIMENTAL FICTION

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 0

What is going to become of a deliberately assembled family album which at the same time was trying to investigate current haunting problems? What does such a form demand?

The need to modify reality, to thicken the time and the situation, to stage things, to create a certain fiction or the illusion of fiction which will make it easier to speak of one’s own reality. What is this own, personal reality?

It is an image that simultaneously generates memory and determines what one would like to remember. It is also an ordinary snapshot or a family picture, as well as an after-image and deja-vu. It is both an account and reminiscence.

Sensitivity to images that are already familiar, that once appeared somewhere before our eyes – eyes conscious or unconscious of what they were seeing.

These images are scenes from movies we have seen, which are put together yet again from the surrounding elements by force of inertia. It is a state in which one wants to build an absolute monarchy of the image and cut oneself off from the non-ideal. To live in this fiction, tangling it up with the form of a family album, framing it and hanging on a hook.

What is a family album without people who can identify the photographs it contains? An album without signatures, names, dates, names of places and the whole context which made it function as a collection of memories of a family? What is left of it when it is handled by someone to whom it was not addressed? What becomes of the reading of only the visual layer which is usually of secondary importance during the selection and choosing of the photographs for the album? What does the narrative springing from the sequence of the pictures, scenes, portraits and views speak about? Is it somehow related to the original intention of the author or is it completely at odds with it? Is another, partly reverse situation, possible, a situation in which the photograph without knowledge, consciousness and the will of the artist illustrates the synthesis of the future fate of those who appear in the photograph, the synthesis expressed precisely by means of the meanings and contents of the purely visual layer?

Is it possible to displace memories by the photographs that were taken at the very same time? Can one have a memory consisting only of photographed images, i.e. can one have a memory consisting of photographs only?

--

All images © Jakub Karwowski

WINDY CITY GYM

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 0

The more you sweat, the less you bleed. That's a proverb about training for war. But right now, it's probably taped on the wall of a few boxing gyms across the nation. At a time when a lot of people think of the gym as something with juice bars, valet parking, built-in TVs on the elliptical trainer, boxing gyms, real ones, stand out. Chicago's Windy City Boxing Gym was one of the nation's oldest. In 2006 it was forced to close its doors and find a new location.

The gym operated on the second floor of a red brick warehouse for more than 30 years, and when you walked in, it was like stepping back in time. The wooden floors were warm from thousands of hours of shadow boxing. Old stationary bikes lined up against the poster-covered wall. Punching bags were wrapped in duct tape, and if you hit them hard enough, bits of dust scattered in the air.—npr

In 2004 photographer Kai-Uwe Gundlach was doing a shoot for HP. He was so impressed with the location, atmosphere and people involved that he couldn't resist to stay longer and document it just for himself. These images are some of his personal work.

All images © Kai-Uwe Gundlach

AMEN

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 0

In Africa, football is not a religion. But it is everything a religion should be.

Every village in Africa has one open-air temple with goal posts at opposite ends and devoted followers in the middle. Football breathes happiness into sun-baked days and rain-soaked evenings.

On a continent where not even the basics are taken for-granted, football is precious. And like everything that’s truly precious, it’s a necessity, like bread and water. Amen. So be it. —Ian Brower

Jessica about the series:

This project changed my life. It took on proportions that I could never have imagined. It was a self-funded labour of love that I embarked on with my father. I love Africa and he loves football. I took the photos and did the travelling. He brought the book to life.

The aim of AMEN was to shine the light on all those in the shadow of the World Cup, far from the big stadiums and the corporate carnival-nature of the event. To embrace Africa and everything that makes it unique. To speak of the authenticity and sheer ingeniousness of a continent that manages to do so much with so little. To capture people with simple needs and huge hearts. To express football in its purest form.

I was never much of a football fan, but I've always loved Africa. Eight months were spent on the road in 10 African countries with my Hasselblad, 80mm lens, digital camera, printer, log book and a stock of deflated footballs.

I just followed my gut and felt my way through villages in search of all those little details that speak of Africa's great football passion. For me all the big stories are in the small details. People were incredibly helpful and once I had gained their trust they gave me more than I could ever have imagined. When I got home my head and heart were full of life lessons and beautiful memories. This project was living inside me.

On the last page of the AMEN book I wrote a PROMISE. It was essentially a promise I made to myself after being deeply touched by the people whose faces adorn the pages of my book. I believed if my message was heard that I could received sponsorship in terms of equipment to give back to all those who trusted me. The dream came true thanks to Adidas and other spontaneous donors such as Chris Bean and Sarah Caplan.

The World Cup may be over but the project is still very alive.

All images Jessica Hilltout

Note: The book is available here

void

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:00:00 0

New York City. Population: 8,175,133 distributed over a land area of just 305 square miles. One of these people spends his free time walking around with large format camera taking photos of ad signs. Weird? Not in our world...

Read what Chang Kyun Kim says about his recent project:

Although we see tons of images everyday, we don't process every info out of them, rather we take it for granted as a way of normal life today. The ad signs made of LED screens, which pour out endless light and moving visuals, can be a symbol of how we perceive this flashing world around and what's left at the end.

I believe the amount of images we distinguish daily is way beyond the level that we are capable of processing. It seemed to me that the ad signs just become blank panels with void light in our memory and perception at the end of a day, just as a computer CPU freezes when it receives too much information.

Because of the sheer intensity of the light from LED screens, when I expose to other details around it, the signs become completely washed out, showing void remnant of the mass info, which we can't see in reality.

All images © Chang Kyun Kim

BIG APPETITE

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 0

Polish photographer Magdalena Kmiecik currently studies at the Hogeschool Antwerpen in Belgium. Her photographs possess an amazing light style, and are often based on brilliant concept. During the last couple of years she has been mainly focused on fashion photography and portrait. Recently however, she also creates very elaborated artistic projects.

About the portraits published here Magda says: "People always have a big appetite for watching others. It is also influencing me. I like to watch people who cannot be easily guessed, whose personality is unlike any other. I often photograph people whose aura is interesting for me, or are in some way close to me."

AFTERMATH

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 00:00:00 0

Simona Ghizzoni was born in Reggio Emilia, Italy, in 1977. After studying the classics, she attended the Istituto Superiore di Arti Visive e Fotografia in Padua, where she graduated in 2002. She went on to gain an MA in the history of photography from the University of Bologna in 2007, with a thesis on the history of psychiatric photography.

Since 2005 Ghizzoni has committed herself to reportage and personal research projects, especially concerning the condition of women. In 2006 she was selected for the Reflexions Masterclass, held by photographer Giorgia Fiorio and the curator Gabriel Bauret. In the same year she tied for first prize at the FNAC photo contest, with the work Scars, an essay on Sarajevo ten years after the end of the war. She took a third place prize from World Press Photo in 2008, a second place magazine feature picture story award at POYi in 2009, and was recently selected as one of 12 photographers to participate in the 16th Annual World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass.

Ghizzoni is based in Rome and represented by Contrasto.

Simona explains in her statement:

Since early 2006, concurrent with my first reportage assignments, I have worked on a personal research project exploring the decay of memories. The following photographs are an abstract from the series titled Aftermath.

While originally meaning the welcome first new growth of grass after the cutting of hay, aftermath has now commonly come to mean the period following a major event or consequences of that event.

This work explores the aftermath of innocence lost. Growing up means you have to abandon the fantastic world of your childhood where everything is wrapped in a magic halo. When you are a child, the world is alive and humanized - animals, plants, and objects. My photographs are a glance at my childhood fantasies transformed in the aftermath to frozen and eerie visions.

All images © Simona Ghizzoni

I know I have promised not to show these photos to anyone, but please understand me man. There’s too great of a story behind those pictures. It’d be a shame if they wound up in your drawer like a rest of your stuff. When people see this, they‘ll be buying you drinks. I guess anyone would like that.

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 0

APNEA

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:00:00 0

Collaboration between Przemek Dzienis and Dorota Buczkowska was initiated couple of years ago. In 2010 one of their projects was highlighted by curators of Paris Photo by being published on the cover of an album dedicated to Central European Photography.
Their latest series titled Apnea was made entirely on location in Switzerland. Paper forms prepared by Buczkowska play with the viewer a specific hide-and-seek game - sometimes becoming more visible and sometimes hiding themselves almost entirely inside the landscape.

As we can read in the text prepared by Zofia Cielatkowska: "Apnea is a stopped moment, motionless, paused. That's how you can look at this project: as on a stop before the curtain or before a hole, temporal suspension, which after a while becomes one or another."

All images © Przemek Dzienis in collaboration with Dorota Buczkowska

UNTIL THE KINGDOM COMES

WALL DONE MAGAZINE — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 00:00:00 0

In his ongoing series Until the Kingdom Comes, begun in 2004 and first shown in 2006, Simen Johan depicts a natural world hovering between reality, fantasy and nightmare. Merging traditional photographic techniques with digital methods, Johan’s images are crafted over time and may include a synthesis of landscapes from various geographical locations and animals photographed in captivity or in the wild.

He blurs the boundaries between the real and the unreal, re-imagining worlds that, much like our own, are forever a mystery. Majestic animals in fantasy landscapes are set in relief against a darker reality, one of absence and longing. The work addresses primal experiences, shaped by desires and fears—solitary paths towards imagined fulfillment.

All images are from the series Until the Kingdom Comes © Simen Johan, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.