Popel Coumou
notion that direct observation can be beamed through a lens to the viewer. They are quiet pictures that, together, build to a boisterous whole. (adapted from an original text by Tim Davis)
The essence of Popel Coumous photography is a game that plays with our perception of the real. Her constructed realities and imagined spaces are the result of an intricate process involving 2D sketches, real-time models made from clay, paper or other materials, light and photography. Coumou intuitively explores feelings of nostalgia and melancholy and their connection to spaces and locations. The immaterial, dreamlike quality of much of Coumous work adds to the sense of mystery and dislocation it evokes. To define the spaces and interiors , Coumou has made cunning use of bright colours and bold geometric forms. These shapes are increasingly used as singular motifs within a landscape or an outdoor scene. I nitially this may increase the recognizability and familiarity of the representation, but it also allows Coumou to undermine clichés and to investigate the erratic shapes that occur in nature.
Grace Kim
In the series Constellations Grace Kim has created works that exhibit both eeriness and a sense of humour. Perspectives are altered, humans tumble through the air alongside ravens, while cars make their way, like Jesus walking on water, along Venetian canals. The series includes strange but poetic black-and-white landscapes. All the photographs are constructed by piecing together fragments or photos collected on Kims travels and everyday wanderings, as well as some that she sourced online. Grace Kim is interested in the sensibility of collage because it echoes the process by which memory is constructed through selective inclusion or exclusion,
Sifting through so many submissions from more than fifty countries gives us a broad overview of photographic trends and interests. Alejandro Cartagena
intuition and personal projection. The images are created in an organic, intuitive process that is both free and controlled. Equivalence and contradiction are important to Kims work, and black-and-white photography has a poetry and lyricism that, in combination with purity and formal elegance, explores those themes beautifully.
Alejandro Cartagenas projects examine environmental, urban and social issues that are dominant in the current Latin American landscape. Car Poolers is an example of thinking about how to represent specific relationships between history, culture and economics. Cartagena does this by bringing to light suburban sprawls effect on peoples lives. The series is the result of a rather straightforward photographic approach; once or twice a week Cartagena went to a high pedestrian overpass and waited for pickup trucks to pass on the way to work. He then photographed straight downwards, showing the workers squashed into the back of the truck, often hiding from view. The series can be seen as a metaphor of contemporary Mexican society, and of the socio-political and environmental consequences of a modern suburban boom. The collision between privacy and the public sphere, the act of peeping and sharing something not meant to be revealed, gives the photographs a sense of urgency.
Sam Falls
The work by Samuel Falls presented in this issue consists of images that derive from Falls interest in exploring photographys capacity for representation and challenging its veracity. He made abstract compositions from coloured paper and photographed them with a large-format camera, scanned the film into a computer and painted on it, as it were, in Photoshop. By selecting colours and by making marks on the image, he picks out a colour from one of the pixels that make up the colour of a piece of paper in the image. After adding digital paint, a print is made in archival pigment which is then painted onto the print itself in all the various colours present. The process creates a multimedia composition in which the s ubject becomes an artistic production and an illustration of linear time. Rather than depicting reality through photography, Falls produces a reality that has had no previous existence. A lot of his work is based around stages of production, with the aim of defying the Barthian this-has-been classification of photography.
Shane Lavalette
‘Shane Lavalette was commissioned by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta to make a project about the American south. He took the vernacular music of the region as his point of entry. At first sight the camera, being so single-mindedly visual, seems an illogical tool for investigating music, but Lavalette wisely d ecided not to make a documentary about musicians. Instead he scoured the landscape for the feeling the music evokes, digging for roots rather than picking flowers, hunting for analogies, hints and circumlocutions. He is not painting an epic history of southern music; he is uncovering lyrical fragments of an oral tradition in the visible world, letting them rattle in his carrying case. The pictures in Brand New Tongue are visually straightforward, obsessively clear, devoted to the metaphysical
Giulio Sarchiola
As of 2002 Italy has been engaged in a peace mission on Afghan territory. Afghanistan. The Hidden War consists of a series of portraits of Italian soldiers and a number of documents about the missions undertaken by the Italian army in Afghanistan. The pictures were taken in the Afghan provinces of Farah and Herat in
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theme introduction