Art Narratives

“The most difficult part of the creation process is after having photographed and being home again, to select the right pictures and find a good order. In this process everything is possible. Sometimes you need to kill your darlings to make the whole story work. The whole effect of the series has a higher value than the sum of the single picture. I spent about a month abroad in California. If you go out every day and take pictures, there are quite a few when you return home. The difficult part is to reduce it and find a selection that works. Even though you have to kick out pictures you like to make the whole story work for itself.”

Dream for Sale by Martin Lamberty (4/4)

“During the 1950’s major touristic development plans existed for Salton Sea. Investors became interested, infrastructure was built, even celebrities took part in its promotion. Plenty of lots were sold and the area experienced a great boom. Many people from the surrounding cities like Los Angeles or San Diego spent their vacations at the lake. Boat races became popular and a sport fishing scene was established due to best weather conditions and a broad variety of marine life. There were numerous motels and even a golf court. An ever-growing number of celebrities from Hollywood attracted more and more people.

The idyll did not last long, however. In the mid-1970’s two tropical storms swept across the area. Since Salton Sea does not have an outlet they bursted its banks considerably. Many buildings close to the shore were flooded and essentially destroyed. The initial elation to create a French Rivera in California was ruined.”

Dream for Sale by Martin Lamberty (3/4)

“Dream for Sale is a story about people living in a lost place. Salton Sea, in the midst of a desert, is a saltlake surrounded by a hostile environment. Originally, the Salton Sink was a part of the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean. It was separated by sediments of the Colorado River. Thus, Lake Cahuilla was created. Due to the climate it dried up hundred of years ago. In 1905 a dam of the Colorado River broke. For two years the river changed its course and emptied itself into the deepest point of the Salton Sink. The largest lake of California, Salton Sea, was born.”

Dream for Sale by Martin Lamberty (2/4)

“The largest lake in California has a person thinking of lush green landscapes with a rich flora and fauna. It was the desert-like surroundings that struck me most when I first arrived there. Ruinous houses everywhere, old piers indicate former water levels, stranded boats now only fit for scrap, inhabitants that seem a lot less euphoric than the postcards from the 1950’s promised. Wandering around in this wasteland words like desolate and barren come to mind. Why do people hold on to this place? For what reason do they stay and fight against nature although there is no recovery in sight?”

Dream for Sale by Martin Lamberty (1/4)

“The first photographs that strongly inspired and encouraged me in what I was doing were Thomas Struth’s street pictures. Being an autodidact without formal education, it was all trial and error for him in the beginning. His street picture series, stretching from his home region of North Rhine-Westfalia over New York to Tokyo and Shanghai, intuitively felt right to me as it was neither sensationalistic nor exploiting some superficial exoticism, but felt true and authentic.

It may not come as a surprise, but I feel at home when looking at works from Wright Morris, Walker Evans or William Eggleston. There is a whole tradition of photography discovering the man-made environment we are living in, and I feel like being part of it. Another school of street photography, exemplified by Henri Cartier-Bresson, is following a more journalistic drive, focusing on humans in everyday situations, and while I like that as well, it is nothing that I would like to do myself.”

Tokyo Radiant by Philipp Zechner (4/4)

“In order to capture the sense of insecurity and eeriness I felt in Tokyo in 2012, I experimented with different styles and techniques – monochrome pictures with harsh contrasts or shots with high sensitivity to bump up the graininess. One day, I discovered a modified digital camera where the filter to block IR rays had been removed and purchased it. After taking a couple of shots, I knew I had found my medium for this series. These infrared photographs show an everyday world that has changed its colour, its aesthetics reminding of early photographic prints, x-rays or psychedelic visions of the 60s. They thus capture the ambiance of Japan’s capital in a personal, artistic vision and connect to my earlier works by displaying the seemingly known and ordinary world in a different light.”

Tokyo Radiant by Philipp Zechner (3/4)

“As a highly developed country, Japan is well prepared for the natural disasters that frequently strike its islands – earthquakes, typhoons and (in some regions) volcanic eruptions. So even large-scale earthquakes such as the one striking the Niigata region in 2004 claim relatively few lives – back then, only around 100 people died, while in a less developed country an earthquake of the same size would have left thousands of people dead. So people have learned to live with the constant threat and have maybe developed a sense of security, especially in urban regions where infrastructure is good and most buildings are recent. But the Great Eastern Earthquake of 2011 shattered that sense, since its tsunami (not the quake itself) caused destruction beyond any imagination. Flood walls could not resist the masses of water, and the incident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant demonstrated that the planning of the plant had not taken into account such an event. Any country would have been shocked by a catastrophe of this size, but in Japan with its high level of engineering and its faith in technology to solve problems, the shock was probably bigger as everyone would have assumed to be sufficiently prepared and therefore safe. The confusion around the nuclear meltdown and the fact that radiation is invisible surely contributed to the overall anxiety, as no one was really sure about the long-term consequences. While people have widely been indifferent to where their energy comes from, an anti-nuclear movement supported by wide parts of the populations has established in the years following the catastrophe.”

Tokyo Radiant by Philipp Zechner (2/4)

“‘Tokyo Radiant’ is a series of photos shot in Tokyo in 2012 and 2013, using a digital camera modified to capture infrared light. While portraying the Japanese capital in a street photography style, it also seeks to convey the particular atmosphere I encountered when moving back there.

I had lived and worked in Japan between 2004 and 2007, so when returning to Tokyo for a job in 2012 I immediately felt a change in behavior, in the attitude that had taken place. Gone was the optimism that always had kept the country on course, even in the face of natural disasters that frequently strike the archipelago. Fear and uncertainty had spread, putting the nation in a sort of zombie mode where everyone kept on with his daily life without knowing what tomorrow would bring. My initial impression was confirmed in talks with friends and strangers. Explaining everything with the tragic events in 2011, where the Great Eastern Earthquake with its tsunami and the subsequent nuclear meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant had shaken the country, would probably mean to oversimplify, but the catastrophe had sure taken its toll on Japan, making it less light-hearted than it used to be.”

Tokyo Radiant by Philipp Zechner (1/4)

“I had already decided not to shoot with an ordinary camera, stand alone with a digital one. I wanted the shooting atmosphere as calm, as dedicated and as ritual-like as possible. So I went out for a large format analog Technical Camera. I had already done a 3 months course at the Photo Academy in Amsterdam, to be able to work with this specific camera. I and my assistant Julia Gunther set up the set, and we kept a blanket at hand, to warm our veterans during the shoot because the buildings were stone-cold. I could only take three portraits per person, because of the large-scale negatives and the slow process of the Cambo Master-camera.”

Only the Sky Remains Untouched by Claire Felicie (2/4)

“My series is about military men and women who suffer from PTSD: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, due to their participation in UN peacekeeping missions to countries such as Lebanon, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Cambodia. I came upon the idea to portray them, because of my previous series: Here are the young men (2009-2010). This series show the faces of young Dutch marines before, during and after their deployment to Uruzgan, Afghanistan. When this series was published I got a mass of reactions from veterans who recognised something of their own experiences in the faces. They were suffering from PTSD themselves, as they wrote me.”

Only the Sky Remains Untouched by Claire Felicie (@clairefelicie) (1/4)

“In conversation the morning we met in the beautiful Piazza Fontanese in Reggio Emilia for coffee, Enzo told me his work always reflects his desire to find his soul while trying to slow down the process of seeing life as it races by us. In quiet solitude, we can find ourselves and meaning. This series of photographs depicts eerily quiet spaces devoid of life, with the natural world just beyond reach. The slightly unsettling, somewhat conceptual environments Enzo creates here reflect his sense of searching for place and meaning in this new world. He/we are neither a natural part of it, nor able to escape it. How do we resolve our new world? Perhaps we are sentenced to wander forever, in silence and solitude, until we find a way to live in this cold, industrial ‘factory’.”

Gina Costa on Industrial Civilization by Enzo Crispino (4/4)

Today, the abandoned mountains have begun to change their physiognomy. Once extensive hayfield that beautifully caressed the mountainsides, today are only inaccessible fields covered with stems: an orphaned territory left by man’s hand. There was now a new commandment; “Work at the factory. Like the mountains, the green fertile plains also underwent a brutal and radical change. Buildings had to be built, huge expanses of green fields became cement soil. And so the immense grassy fields of the Po Valley have become the perimeter of what was born again: the factory.”

In this body of work. Crispino reveals a cool, crispy, clean detached world of beautifully designed structures. Using a brilliant, constant light, with no emotion, compositions eerily devoid of people Enzo here documents the replacement of the land with these concrete substitutes for mother earth. This is the new visual vocabulary to express the heartache of his (our) lost earthly paradise.

Gina Costa on Industrial Civilization by Enzo Crispino (3/4)

“I began to explore this new subject matter after my exploration of my land and my mountains (the Appennino Reggiano ). What I seem more and more to see was the shortage of peasants, for years. The rural life and its people of the mountain were slowly disappearing. The call was strong, a new job that required less physical effort and was more profitable; A new way of working conception was born: THE FACTORY.

So men, without perhaps even realizing it, began to abandon his connection with the earth. The mutual respect of the laws of nature (…), as it has been for millennia, a sacred relationship disappeared. The newer generations no longer saw their future tied to their roots. Instead, they lost their cultural identity forever, one that was made up of traditions that have been passed down for generations where there was only one primary impulse: respect for the Earth”

Industrial Civilization by Enzo Crispino (2/4)

“The Factory still has the poetic manner of capturing subject matter. However, in these photographs, Enzo is at a cooler remove of the images he captures. In this body of work Enzo visually comments on how the factory buildings, cement highways and bridges have displaced and replaced the fertile countryside with metal and concrete; the new visual images of our time and place. This series is a lament, an elegy to the lost natural countryside that was sacrificed for the concrete edifices that have become our new landscape.”

Gina Costa on Industrial Civilization by Enzo Crispino (1/4)

“While working on the project and getting to know the writers personally, I recognized that the mysticism and tension of the topic graffiti was blurring more and more. Somehow the process was leading to a demystification and a loss of tension of the unknown, which is undoubtedly one of the most exciting and essential parts of graffiti writing. Like Susan Sonntag wrote in her book On Photography: ‘To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.’”

Burning Down the House by Norman Behrendt (4/4)

“While photographing the writers with my Hasselblad I began to ask myself if there might be a different approach to ask the writers for a portrait. I chose the Polaroid as probably the most honest and trustful process of photography. One image — no copies, a one of a kind. For the Polaroid portraits I photographed the writers infront of tiled walls in the subway stations of Berlin. To me, these tiled walls function as a symbolic backdrop — a smooth and easy-to-clean surface which gets an allegory for the daily almost every minute battle for order and cleanliness, a projection surface for different ideologies regarding the appearance and function of the public space in Berlin.”

Burning Down the House by Norman Behrendt (3/4)