Yushi Li is a Chinese artist based in London, working primarily in photography. She received her MA in Photography recently and is doing her PhD in Arts & Humanities at the Royal College of Art. Li was selected as one of the artists for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2018 and nominated as one of the 100 RPS Hundred Heroines in 2019. Her work mainly engages with the question of the gaze in relation to gender, desire and sexuality, culminating in the investigation of the male representation as an erotic subject in light of digital social networks.

See You At Home is an ongoing personal narrative exploring the latent sense of loss from one's heritage while aging as an immigrant in a non-native culture. My parents, Shailendra and Sarla Kapoor, emigrated from India in 1977, settling in a small town of 10,000 people in rural Pennsylvania. They are one of the only few immigrant families in the region. Although they left India for a better life, like many immigrants from the East, the shift from a collectivist nation to an individualistic one led to isolation just as much as it led to freedom. As they grow old in Pennsylvania with both my sister and I no longer living there, my parents' isolation only becomes more apparent to me, despite their success in pursuit of the American Dream. See You At Home explores this dichotomy using images of their current life in America imbued with memories of life back in India.

@kensukekoike

@todayscuriosity

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https://www.karennavarroph.com/

The Constructed Self (2019-2021) explores themes of identity and self-representation through the use of text and unconventional portraiture. Using digital photography as a foundation, I transform traditional prints into three-dimensional objects by cutting and incorporating tactile elements such as wood, paint, and resin. The labor-in-tensive techniques I apply to create these sculptural objects not only allow for a physical deconstruction of my images but also become a form of meditation that reflects my efforts in trying to reconstruct and make sense of my own identity.

Like a puzzle, my identities intersect coming together to construct my multiple sense of Self. Although I do not appear in the pictures I see the works as self-reflective and it's very important for me to show the diversity within my models. As an immigrant from Latin America and a descendant of Indigenous Peoples from the South, I find the need to portray diversity to reframe the history of how people of color have been seen or perceived until now.

Some of the pieces that make up these dimensional portraits can be rearranged and displayed in various ways to express the notion that identity is a social construct. At once colorful, surreal, and minimal, my constructed portraits invite the viewer to challenge their own perceptions and biases, by highlighting the complexities that make up who we are.

https://www.heatherevanssmith.com/blue

Some say my dad's death was the spark that ignited my depression, but this feeling has been brewing for a while.  I started to notice a sadness creep in a few years into my 40s. I searched “depression in women” and stumbled across articles stating women are the most depressed at age 44. I was at that very moment 44.

Loss during this time in a woman’s life can weigh heavily. Children are getting older and need the comfort of a parent less; the health of one’s own parent(s) is starting to fail, and hormonal shifts begin.  

Using the color blue, which for hundreds of years has been associated with melancholy and sadness-these images evoke this period in my life and how it affects those around me. A mid-point, as I am stripping down, taking stock, and finding a new place amongst the loss.

“Trent Bozeman (b.1992) is a photographer currently based in Arkansas. Coming from a journalism background, he is interested in how history is reshaped, documented, and preserved. Bozeman uses his practice as a tool to aid in the act of remembering his past, both ancestral and temporal. His current work explores Gullah sea island communities, specifically Wadmalaw Island, and the memories that continue to prolong their cultural significance. Although there are a few Gullah communities left in South Carolina, Wadmalaw Island remains to be the only island hardly restructured. Being of direct lineage, with family members that still lice on the island, he is able to gain access to an isolated community by conducting interviews and gathering ephemera. He is currently pursuing an MFA in photography at the University of Arkansas.”

“Form & Function is an exploration of how we are situated within our own skin.The work looks at our experience of being human and our fraught relationship with the body, challenging conventional ideas of beauty by capturing a fluidity of gender and identity in a courageously inclusive cast of subjects. These contorted nudes delicately transform what should be intimately familiar into foreign sculptures.”

IS & ISN’T

“Artists from Josef Albers to James Turrell have focused attention on how perception of color is a matter of context. Inspired by this history of color theory practice, I use traditional camera techniques to investigate natural light, atmospheric color and the photograph as object, putting the most ubiquitous of subjects -- the sky -- into unconventional contexts. My work references the Light and Space movement's emphasis on light as subject, while the images' formal aesthetics are influenced by the broad history of modern painting, particularly minimalism, color field and hard edge abstraction. 

All images in Paper Skies and Moving Pictures are created by re-photographing a folded and/or cut print of a sky image (grey clouds, blue sky or sunset close-up) in front of actual sky. (There is no post-production manipulation.) In Paper Skies, the juxtaposition of the print against the actual sky creates an abstract image that emphasizes the ambiguity between the real and the reproduced, and allows the original printed photograph to be seen in a new context as a three-dimensional geometric form. The paper on which the original image is printed transcends its role as simply a substrate for photographic imagery and becomes an active ingredient whose edges, texture and shape play a key role in the final image. The shadows created as the print is re-photographed attest to the interaction between the subject and the environment, and reveal the artist's involvement in creating questions of space and geometry.”

“Modalities explores the creative process behind a photographer's practice through re-contextualizing existing images. Each finished piece is a montage composed of out-takes from the hundreds of images shot during the creation of Paper Skies and Moving Pictures. An on-going series, Modalities tells a visual story about a photographer's intent and decision-making in the course of realizing a finished artwork, and also explores the ways a single subject can be re-imagined in multiple ways.”

LIKE PEARLS

"If you want to protect your most sacred heirlooms, your genes, bury them in spherical treasure chests. Like pearls, eggs last for decades and they're hard to crush, and when they're solicited for fertilization, they travel jauntily down the fallopian tube." - excerpt from Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier

“As a mother of nine children, Laura Bennett spent many years moving to the rhythm of others and keeping order in a somewhat chaotic world. During that time she earned B.A. degrees in Journalism and Studio Art from Humboldt State University in California. Her MFA is from the University of Houston.

Bennett has taught all levels of photography, as well as photo history and history of women artists. She gives workshops and offers individual instruction out of her studio in Auburn, California in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains.  

Bennett uses an old Gundlach 8 x 10 , as well as an early version Hasselblad. In addition to traditional gelatin silver and alternative processes, Bennett also enjoys scanning antique glass negatives, film, objects and ephemera for transformation in the computer and for creating digital negatives.”

“Frenchman Hippolyte Bayard was one of the earliest experimenters in photography, though few will recognize his name today. While working as a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance in the late 1830s and early 1840s, he devoted much of his free time to inventing processes that captured and fixed images from nature on paper using a basic camera, chemicals, and light. The announcement of the inventions of his fellow countryman Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s daguerreotype on January 7, 1839, and Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawing soon after greatly diminished opportunities for recognition of Bayard’s contributions. He was most likely persuaded by François Arago, the head of the French Academy of Sciences, to keep quiet about his own distinct process until after the announcement of Daguerre’s process and subsequent celebration in August of 1839. 

Bayard nonetheless continued his investigations and submitted letters detailing three photographic recipes to the Academy of Sciences. Though he exhibited examples of his work in what has been recognized as the first public exhibition of photography in July 1839 and presented his direct positive process at the Academy of Fine Arts in November of 1839, where it was lauded as an important tool for artists, he remained in the shadows of Daguerre and Talbot.

Bayard is best known today for his 1840 self-portrait as a drowned man, to which he added text protesting the lack of recognition for his invention. The humorous, yet biting text read:

The corpse of the gentleman you see here . . . is that of Monsieur Bayard, inventor of the process that you have just seen. . . . As far as I know this ingenious and indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with perfecting his discovery. . . . The Government, who gave much to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh the vagaries of human life! . . .

In reality, of the three inventors, it was Bayard who actively continued to photograph the longest. He was a founding member in the 1850s of the Société héliographique and its successor, the Société française de photographie. He kept up with the latest developments in the world of photography and integrated new processes into his practice. He was one of only five photographers selected to be part of the Missions héliographiques in 1851, charged with the task of documenting France’s historic architecture for the Commission des Monuments historiques. He exhibited regularly in the universal expositions and, in the 1860s after his retirement from the Ministry of Finance, opened a photographic portrait studio in Paris with Charles Albert d'Arnoux, known as Bertall (1820-1882). During his lifetime, Bayard was described as the “Grandfather of Photography” by several commentators. The Légion d’honneur (still considered today the highest order of military and civil decoration in France) awarded him the first level of merit—Chevalier— in 1863. In the late 1860s he left Paris and moved to Nemours near his lifelong friend, the actor and painter Edmond Geffroy (1804-1895). Bayard died there in 1887.”

––  text excerpt from Hippolyte Bayard page on the Getty Museum website

[Windmills of Montmartre], 1842, Salted Paper Print

[Dilapidated shack], c.1840-1849, Salted Paper Print

[Woman in Entryway of Tower], c.1840-1849, Salted Paper Print

[Church and Chateau of Saint-Ouen], 1845, Salted Paper Print

[Self-portrait in garden], c. 1845-1849, Salted Paper Print

[Group portrait in garden], c.1847, Salted Paper Print

[Construction Worker, Paris], c.1845-1847, Salted Paper Print

[Still Life in Bayard's Garden: Baskets, Watering Can and Planter Pots], 1848, Salted Paper Print

[Still Life of Flowers in a Vase], November 1846, Salted Paper Print

WAVEFORMS

“As a lens-based artist I am deeply interested with the fluidity of photography– constantly redefining itself and problematizing its status as a fixed medium,” Hobson writes in his artist’s statement. “Through a broad practice that embraces the studio, still life, re-photography, material experimentation, abstraction and non-representation, I aim to challenge and expand upon the primary tenets of the medium: originality, faithfulness, reproduction and indexicality.” –– from Cheney Free Press article

Vestige

“I made this work by scanning a found cabinet card photograph, digitally removing the subject, printing the altered image, and finally mounting the new photograph on top of the original cabinet card. Of the original image, only the shoes remain in front of the photographer’s backdrop, marking the place where the subject once stood. Empty shoes have been used to suggest loss in a number of different cultures: on a gravestone they indicate the loss of a child; outside a Greek home they once communicated a son’s death in battle. These altered photographs are now small memorials to past lives.”

BITTERSWEET  ON  BOSTWICK  LANE at Candela Gallery

In this body of work I am coming to terms with loss. I have lost both my father and my mother, yet it's the suicide of my brother that seeps into my work like a slow forming stain, and has become a stand in for the others. My brother took his own life on his first visit home after severing his spinal cord in a motorcycle accident. What always comes to mind is the first few lines of his suicide note.

"I arrived home just about the time the honeysuckle blooms" Russell was not the sort of person to notice flowers, so I find it really beautiful, and achingly sad at how poetic it was for him to stop and see the beauty around him if only because he knew it would be for the last time. The last person to see my brother alive was my oldest neighbor, Margaret Daniel. It's fitting that she has now become my subject and the strongest thread throughout my work. The first time we sat together to make a portrait, she told me the story of Russell's last day. " I made your brother my home made bread, his favorite... I buttered a slice and took it up to him, and he called down, Margaret can I have some more of that bread? He finished the whole loaf, and then me and your mother went for a walk down the lane and when we came back he had shot himself." Margaret gracefully weaves stories of buttering my brother's last slice of bread with memories of me as a young girl, wanting to eat her homemade strawberry jelly on my new white bedspread. She laughs as she recalls finding me with fruit all over the bed. Blood and jelly, two very different stains. I thread these stories together, of pain and loss and of the sweetness of childhood memories. My memories become intertwined with hers as I rediscover my past through her stories. Together, we've created a family album of what was once the intangible landscape of my childhood. The work encircles itself as our conversations about native flowers, life and death become the seeds of my photographs. Each time I visit Margaret I enter through the kitchen door, and each time she has a new story to tell which enriches my work like a complex broth. The kitchen and the yard are where we do our fieldwork, as we pick fruit and remove the rotten parts to make a more palatable jelly. This process has become a sort of poetry for me, as I document her showing me how to strain the last remnants of sweetness and color from crabapples, using bandages to catch the pink-stained juice. One day I remove a piece of Margaret's bread straight from the oven and I take it home to let it rot. As the decay forms over the surface I photograph it. When I show the picture to Margaret, instead of being mad that I ruined her bread, she excitedly starts naming the types of mold that rest on its surface. One is penicillin which is used to heal. I realize that a project that I thought was about death is actually about healing.

Description of Sepuya by aperture on the page for his self-titled photography book:

“Paul Mpagi Sepuya presents the work of one of the most prominent, up-and-coming photographers working today. Sepuya primarily makes studio photographs of friends, artists, collaborators, and himself, inviting viewers to consider the construction of subjectivity. He challenges and deconstructs traditional portraiture by way of collage, layering, fragmentation, mirror imagery, and the perspective of a black, queer gaze. In contrast to the slick artifice of contemporary portraiture, Sepuya suggests the human element of picture taking—fingerprints, smudges, dust on the surface of mirrors. He also allows glimpses into the studio setting—including tripods, backdrops, lenses, and the photographer himself—encouraging multivalent narrative reads of each image. For Sepuya, photography is a tactile and communal enterprise. Although the creation of artist books has been a long-standing part of his practice, Paul Mpagi Sepuya is the first publication of his work to be released widely, copublished with the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis on the occasion of a major solo exhibition.“