British Journal of Photography

BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY

160 years in print

january 2014

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january 2014 picture © JAMIE HAWKeSWORTH

Volume 161 Issue No 7820

18 ISABELLE WENZEL 20 SIM CHI YIN 22 ARNAU BLANCH 24 REN HANG 32 TXEMA SALVANS 34 ASO MOHAMMADI 38 SARKER PROTICK 40 CHARLIE ENGMAN 44 CEMIL BATUR GÖKÇEER 50 SYNCHRODOGS 54 DAISUKE YOKOTA 62 MATHIEU CESAR 64 JAMIE HAWKeSWORTH 68 WASMA MaNSOUR 74 JANA ROMANOVA

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Our search for the best emerging talent from around the world

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the talent issue

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ONES TO WATCH 10/12/2013 18:35

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BritisH JOUrnaL OF pHOtOGrapHy

An artistic eye

160 years in print

JanUary 2014

,

picture © JAMie HAWKeSWOrtH

january 2014 Volume 161 Issue No 7820 £6.99 US $14.99 AUS $14.95

the talent issue

OnES TO WaTCH Our search for the best emerging talent from around the world 18 isaBelle WenZel 20 siM Chi Yin 22 aRnau BlanCh 24 Ren hanG 32 tXeMa salVans 34 asO MOhaMMaDi 38 saRKeR PROtiCK 40 ChaRlie enGMan 44 CeMil BatuR GÖKÇeeR 50 sYnChRODOGs 54 DaisuKe YOKOta 62 Mathieu CesaR 64 JaMie haWKesWORth 68 WasMa MansOuR 74 Jana ROManOVa

10/12/2013 18:35 05/12/2013 14:37

Volume 161 Issue No 7820

www.bjp-online.com editorial director Simon Bainbridge 020 8123 6873 bjp.editor@bjphoto.co.uk deputy editor Diane Smyth 020 7193 0886 diane.smyth@apptitudemedia.co.uk associate editor Olivier Laurent 020 8123 6224 bjp.news@bjphoto.co.uk senior writer Gemma Padley gemma@apptitudemedia.co.uk senior production editor Donatella Montrone designer Clare White ipad designer Nicky Brown contributors Gerry Badger, Tom Brannigan, Laurence Butet-Roch, Kevin Carter, Lucy Davies, Jonathan Eastland, Brad Feuerhelm, Peter Hamilton, Lauren Heinz, David Kilpatrick, Richard Kilpatrick, Bill Kouwenhoven, Stephen McLaren, Colin Pantall, Steve Pill, Aaron Schumann, Rachel Segal Hamilton, Eliza Williams, Adam Woolfitt commercial manager Jamie Fricker 020 3239 3866 jamie@apptitudemedia.co.uk key account manager Jane Cardona 020 8123 8707 jane.cardona@apptitudemedia.co.uk sales executive Richard Morrall 020 7193 0444 richard.morrall@apptitudemedia.co.uk marketing manager Rahila Ehsan rahila@apptitudemedia.co.uk marketing director Marc Ghione marcg@apptitudemedia.co.uk creative director Mick Moore mick@apptitudemedia.co.uk cto Tom Royal tom@apptitudemedia.co.uk digital operations manager Ross Harman ross.harman@apptitudemedia.co.uk business development manager Kelli Bromley kelli.bromley@apptitudemedia.co.uk founder and ceo Marc Hartog 020 7193 2654 marc@apptitudemedia.co.uk

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To find your nearest newsagent stocking BJP, call 01895 433 823 or email mark.foker@comag.co.uk

If you’re looking for something specific, you’ve got the internet. But a magazine should be about discovery – a place to find things you hadn’t even thought about, providing new perspectives on the talking points of the day, inviting you in on discussions between the people whose opinions count.

I’ve always seen it as part of our remit to showcase emerging photographers, providing a platform for new talent to be seen by a wider public and by people of influence. This month, we’ve devoted most of the issue to our Ones to Watch in 2014, dropping our usual array of features as well as our Projects and Intelligence sections, to devote a full 61 pages to 30 photographers we believe are on the verge of something big. Plus it’s a positive start to the year – a way of looking forward after looking back in our December annual review.

But I’ve always been frustrated by these kinds of surveys, which so often limit their scope to a specific geography or age group or type of institution. There is no perfect way, just as there’s no easy way to define ‘emerging’, but what I have committed to is getting nominations from every place where there is a photographic culture made by people who have an active and proven engagement with emerging photographers. So we’ve reached out far and wide to people we know who fit that remit, and searched out people who could advise us, especially on territories outside Europe and North America. In that, we were not entirely successful, but we will continue to strive to improve it for next year, and I am nonetheless certain that, with the collective knowledge and experience of our 66 advisors actively seeking nominations rather than a random call for entries, this is the most far-reaching survey of its kind.

So what can we tell from this year’s Ones to Watch? A decade or even five years ago, most of them would probably have been working in an open documentary approach, committed to social engagement but dismissive of any claim to objective truths. The move towards a more processled approach is hardly new, but it has picked up momentum, and arguably it has become the new decree. Art is the sacred cow providing the unwritten rules, not journalism. The work is usually staged or the subject intervened upon. It is often shot in a controlled environment, such as a studio, and often references sculpture or involves performative acts. Narrative, if it is present at all, is loosely traced and mysterious. Meaning has become as slippery as truth.

Much has been made of a generation growing up with the internet at their disposal. But anyone who has become interested in photography in the last 15 years also has infinite possibilities to discover photography in the real world – through exhibitions, festivals, books and magazines (though, curiously, not news-led publications) that would have been much harder to seek out.

There has been an explosion in the number of photography courses in higher education during that time, as many have bemoaned, and even the most snooty institutions now embrace the medium. Photography has gone mainstream.

Young photographers don’t have the same grudges, or the same trenchant positions on art and fashion, or pretty much anything for that matter. They work across different media, and their influences are likely to stretch beyond other photographers to include different kinds of artists and the vernacular of advertising and commercial imagery. But, more than anything, the work is a lot less serious. Sometimes I delight in this newfound sense of play – a throwback to Dada and Surrealism – but other times, I’m left scratching my head at the emptiness of a purely aesthetic wisdom, and the curious reappearance of certain objects, such as oranges and bananas and broken mirrors and coloured paper and test strips and rocks and, lately, that ubiquitous orange plastic barrier netting used to protect us from temporary safety hazards or freshly laid turf. Why is that suddenly everywhere, on our roads, in our parks and even in our photographs?

Early on, I mentioned the internet, and so I’ll end by pointing you towards our new website (bjp-online.com). In future you’ll be able to enjoy a more image-rich approach to stories – if only because it’s easier for us to make use of the great flow of amazing images we are sent and seek out.

Simon Bainbridge, Editor philanthropic & media partner

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contents

© Isabelle Wenzel

agenda

07-10

30-31

48-49

Patrick Willocq

Mari Bastashevski

Welcome to FLTR – our new smartphone magazine | Deutsche Börse Prize | Presidential photo shoots | AFP v Morel

An alternate universe

A different take on the Congo

The hidden corridors of power

32-33

50-51

Synchrodogs

68-69

Wasma Mansour

Roadside rendevous

The Ukrainian duo experiment

Saudi women in British society

34-35

52-53

Back to basics

People and places from the Empire

36-37

54-55

72-73

A witty take on misogynist art

What makes a space a place?

The invisibles

A refreshing eye on the abstract

20-21

38-39

56-57

74-75

A fly on a Chinese wall

A touching portrait of love and loss

Setting stage for new concepts

22-23

40-41

58-59

76-77

News

12-15

Exhibitions Stand-out shows to start the year ones to watch

18-19

Isabelle Wenzel

Sim Chi Yin

Arnau Blanch

Kazuyoshi Usui

Txema Salvans

Aso Mohammadi

Jon Tonks

Gilles Roudière

Daisuke Yokota

Sarker Protick

Thomas Brown

Charlie Engman

Sanne De Wilde

66-67

70-71

Louis Heilbronn

The wanderer

Jack Davison

Jana Romanova Reconstructing lost family ties

Jill Quigley

Entering the recesses of our minds

An accidental fashion photographer

China’s theme park of dwarves

A new take on abandoned buildings

24-25

42-43

60-61

technology

The lure of the unremarkable

Poetic connections between pictures

44-45

62-63

Ren Hang

The naked truth

26-27

Alvaro Laiz Mongolia’s transgenders

28-29

Thomas Albdorf Form, structure and composition

Annegien van Doorn

Cemil Batur Gökçeer

Unbottling the genie

46-47

Emile Barret

A cacophony in images

Peter Watkins

Mathieu Cesar Seducer of the fashion world

64-65

Jamie Hawkesworth Romanticising the street aesthetic

81-89

Camera tests

Canon Powershot G16 | Mindshift rotation 180 Pro | Canon EOS 70D | CamRanger endrame

98

Retracing 160 years of history in the pages of BJP

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The best of the new year BJP’s editors pick out the exhibitions they’re most looking forward to in 2014 Warhol, Burroughs and Lynch The Photographers’ Gallery kicks off its decidedly vintage programme for 2014 with a trio of exhibitions (17 January to 30 March) of and by heroes of the counter-culture: Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs, Andy Warhol: Photographs 1976-1987 and David Lynch: The Factory Photographs.

The first will feature more than 100 works, including vintage photographs, collages and assemblages, as well as related ephemera such as postcards,

Agenda exhibitions

magazine and book covers, and adverts used in Burroughs’ pieces.

The exhibition takes place in the centenary of his birth, the title referencing the author’s predilection for heroin and firearms as well as photography.

The Warhol show is claimed to be the first major UK survey of the artist’s 10×8 prints, as opposed to the Polaroids for which he is known, focusing on the photographs he made after he ‘divorced’ his tape recorder in favour of a diminutive 35mm compact, which afforded the collector a newfound freedom in the last 11 years of his life.

The Lynch show brings together 80 images of derelict factories taken in Germany, Poland, New York and England between 1980 and 2000, originally shot while the filmmaker was location-scouting. www.thephotographersgallery.org.uk

Bailey’s Stardust In the UK at least, there’s only one photographer you could justifiably call a household name. David Bailey’s prolific career is well documented: having shot his first cover for British Vogue in 1961, his work (and his love life) became synonymous with London in the Swinging Sixties, when he was at his height.

So it’s perhaps a surprise to think that this – Bailey’s Stardust, showing at the National Portrait Gallery in London from 06 February to 01 June – is the first major retrospective of the 76-year-old in his home town for more than a decade (the last being at the same venue in 2002).

The 250 or so pictures in the exhibition, sponsored by Hugo Boss, were personally selected and printed by Bailey, and will be shown across a series of rooms, featuring

a range of subjects – from models and musicians to writers, filmmakers and the people he encountered in his travels, from iconic portraits to lesser-known photographs and more recent images. www.npg.org.uk

Philippe Halsman, Astonish Me! Perhaps best known for the 101 covers he did for Life magazine and his prolific collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Philippe Halsman was one of the most in-demand celebrity portraitists of his day.

After his debut in Paris in the 1930s, he went on to run a highly successful studio in New York between 1940 and 1970, photographing everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Albert Einstein, Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Cocteau [pictured].

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[Clockwise, from right] Man with Camera, 1991 © Duane Hanson / Sammlung Artsquare / Courtesy of Van de Weghe Fine Art, New York / The Estate of Duane Hanson / Licensed by VAGA, New York / Tom Powel Imaging, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; The Versatile Jean Cocteau, 1949 © Philippe Halsman Archive 2013 / Magnum Photos; Kate Moss, 2013 © David Bailey; David Lynch Untitled (England), late 1980s/early 1990s © Collection of the artist

Halsman, who died 35 years ago, produced a phenomenal body of work, consistently pushing and exploring the technical boundaries of photography. At the centre of his diverse practice was his desire to explore the medium’s creative possibilities, including the development of his trademark ‘jumpology’ technique, in which his subjects are shown leaping in the air, and he coauthored many works with Dalí, demonstrating his appreciation of photographic performance. This retrospective exhibition, produced in collaboration with the Halsman Archive for Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland (29 January to 11 May), presents more than 300 original prints, contact sheets and mock-ups, giving an insight into the photographer’s working processes. www.elysee.ch

Lens-based sculpture This latest exhibition from Berlin Akademie der Künste throws some reverse context on the current trend for sculptural material and readymades in contemporary photography. Featuring more than 200 works by some 70 international artists, including a reconstruction of a 1937 piece

by Marcel Duchamp and a host of practitioners who have been working prolifically since the 1960s, the show (24 January to 21 April) considers the part photography has played, and continues to play, in facilitating changes in the aesthetics of sculpture. www.adk.de

Robert Heinecken: Object Matter “If you’re talking about John Baldessari, you should also be talking about Robert Heinecken,”

says MoMA New York’s photography curator, Eva Respini. She is putting together a show this spring (15 March to 22 June) that covers nearly five decades of the American artist’s work – from the 1960s to the late ’90s – taking in his entire oeuvre, including photography, sculpture, video, installation, printmaking and collage. Now being rediscovered as one of the pioneers of found art and postwar conceptualism in Los Angeles, Heinecken referred to himself as a ‘para-photographer’ because his work stood ‘beside’ or ‘beyond’ traditional ideas associated with photography; he would cull images from newspapers, magazines, television and pornography, which he then reassembled. And while he may not have been a photographer himself, by dismantling and recontextualising photographs in

the way that he did, he questioned the nature of photography and arguably contributed to the perception of photography as an artistic medium, a topic that is as relevant and hotly debated today as it was during his lifetime. www.moma.org

Apartheid and After Featuring the work of South African photographers David Goldblatt, Pieter Hugo, Guy Tillim, Paul Albers and Mikhael Subotzky, among others, Apartheid and After at Amsterdam’s recently enlarged and refurbished Huis Marseille photography museum, opens at an especially pertinent time. Opening in the wake of Nelson Mandela’s death in December, the exhibition (15 March to 08 June) asks, ‘Where did South African photographers whose earlier work opposed the

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Agenda exhibitions

[Clockwise, from right] Flucht (Flight), 1931 © Hannah Höch / Collection of IFA, Stuttgart; from Saddam is Here, 2009-2010 © Jamal Penjweny; from Ponte City © Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse; Laboratory of the Future, 1935 © Man Ray Trust / The Museum of Modern Art / Gift of James Johnson Sweeney / Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris; Recto/Verso #2, 1988 © The Robert Heinecken Trust / The Museum of Modern Art / Mr and Mrs Clark Winter Fund; Child Minder, Joubert Park, Johannesburg, 1975 © David Goldblatt; Zirkusartisten, 1926–1932 © August Sander Archiv, Köln / Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

apartheid regime train their lenses after it had ended?’ Through the images on display, the exhibition explores the notion that many pre-eminent South African imagemakers continued to photograph their home country, perhaps in a bid to confront past atrocities or an attempt to look towards a more democratic, brighter future. In doing so, they have helped to bring South African photography to international attention. www.huismarseille.nl

August Sander: The Archive – Masterpieces and Discoveries It is the 50th anniversary of German photographer August Sander’s death, and to mark the occasion, Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, the institution that holds his official

archive in his hometown of Cologne, will present some 300 of his works, spanning five decades. At the exhibition’s core (21 March to 03 August) will be images from the photographer’s best-known series, People of the 20th Century, alongside other lesser-known portraits and a selection of Sander’s landscapes, cityscapes and commissioned work. www.sk-kultur.de/photographie

Hannah Höch The Whitechapel Gallery’s latest show will bring one of the early pioneers of Dada and political montage to a new audience, featuring more than 100 of Hannah Höch’s photo collages and various art works, spliced together from popular magazines, illustrated journals and fashion publications to create humorous, satirical and

often poignant commentaries on the changing society in which she lived. At times exploring the concept of the ‘New Woman’ in Weimar Germany, Höch broached complex discussions about gender and identity, creating works of poetic beauty that were at the same time bitingly critical of her society.

The exhibition (15 January to 23 March), spans six decades, from the 1910s to 1970s, and charts Höch’s career – from her early work, which was influenced by her time in the fashion industry, to key photomontages from her Dada period. www.whitechapelgallery.org

Saddam is Here This year, Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery celebrates its 50th anniversary with a packed programme of exhibitions and events, among them Jamal

Penjweny’s Saddam is Here, featuring photographic and video work by the Iraqi Kurdistan-born emerging artist who came to international attention following his inclusion in last year’s Venice Biennale.

He began working with painting and sculpture, but after moving to Baghdad 10 years ago, started shooting photographs about the Iraq conflict, which were published by newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Washington Post and National Geographic, before adding film to his repertoire and adopting a sometimes more allegorical approach, showing his work in exhibitions in Europe, the Middle East, North and South America and China.

The title series in what will be the artist’s first solo exhibition

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(19 February to 21 April) shows Iraqi people in familiar surroundings holding life-size pictures of Saddam Hussein’s face in front of their own. On the surface, the images appear to be tongue in cheek, but beneath the humour they serve as a reminder of the former dictator’s continuing shadow on events. www.ikon-gallery.org

Ponte City A single iconic building in Johannesburg lies at the heart of South African photographer Mikhael Subotzky and Britishborn artist Patrick Waterhouse’s award-winning installation project, elements of which will go on display at Le Bal in Paris this month (17 January to 20 April), having been shown in smaller scale as part of last year’s ICP Triennial of

photography and video art in New York, titled A Different Kind of Order, and the Rencontres d’Arles festival two years before, where it was given the Discovery Award.

The 54-storey cylindrical Ponte City skyscraper, built in 1975, was intended to be a luxury residential apartment block, but as the surrounding area became ever-more rundown, so too did the building. As Subotzky explains, Ponte City became riddled with crime and drugs, becoming something of a symbol of urban decay. For the past few years, Subotzky and Waterhouse have collected old marketing and advertising materials relating to the building as part of a wider project to document and explore the building’s complex history and the lives of the residents who inhabited

this much mythologised building.

The exhibition at Le Bal brings together many of these documents, which include maps, brochures and press clippings alongside portraits and images of daily life, created by the duo for the project. en.le-bal.com

A World of its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio Featuring up to 200 works by nearly 90 photographers and artists, A World of its Own (MoMA New York, 08 February to 05 October) features work by luminaries including Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, Uta Barth, Karl Blossfeldt, Harry Callahan, Irving Penn, Edward Steichen, William Wegman and Edward Weston.

Considering the various roles played by the photographer’s studio, it considers factors such as

the era in which these artists were working, as well as their individual motivations, and the ways in which they have used the studio as a stage, a laboratory or a playground.

Organised thematically, the show includes segments on theatrical tableaux by photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Cindy Sherman; the use of neutral, blank backdrops (Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe); the construction of sets (Francis Bruguière and Thomas Demand); post-production in the darkroom (Walead Beshty and Christian Marclay); precise recordings of time and motion (Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton); and playful experimentation (Roman Signer, Fischli & Weiss). www.moma.org

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Ones to Watch Our Talent Issue returns with 30 emerging photographers selected from around the world, suggested by an international panel of nominators made up of photographers, editors, curators and educators

Nominators Laia Abril (Colors), Helka Aleksdóttir (Photolia), Simon Bainbridge (BJP), Xavier Barral (Editions Xavier Barral), Harvey Benge (photographer), Pierre Bessard (Editions Bessard), Yannick Boullis (Offprint), Isabella Brancolini (Brancolini Grimaldi), Anne Bourgeois-Vignon (Nowness), Emma Bowkett (FT Weekend Magazine), Susan Bright (curator), Carmen Brunner (Dummy), Laurence Butet-Roch (Polka), Joerg Colberg (Conscientious), Daniel Campbell Blight (curator), Antonio Carloni (Cortona On The Move), Bruno Ceschel (Self Publish Be Happy), Zelda Cheatle (curator), Jerome Delay (Associated Press), Ruth Eichorn (Geo), Hedy van Erp (Icon Foundation), Liza Faktor (Screen), Rémi Faucheux (RVB Books), Brad Feuerhelm (curator/art dealer), Taj Forer (Daylight), Marc Feustel (Eyecurious), Manik Katyal (Imaho Magazine), Erik Kessels (art director/curator), Yumi Goto (Reminders), Hans Gremmen (designer) Michael Grieve (photographer), George Georgiou (photographer), Olivia Gideon Thomson (We Folk), Ihiro Hayami (Phat Photo), Nathalie Herschdorfer (curator), Michael Hoppen (gallerist), Barry W. Hughes (Super Massive Black Hole), Paula James (Panos), Hester Keijser (curator), Lidwine Kervella (Courrier International), Olivier Laurent (BJP), Sarah Leen (National Geographic), Celina Lunsford (Fotografie Forum Frankfurt), Vincent Marcilhacy (The Eyes), Stephen Mayes (Tim Hetherington Trust), Louise Mazmanian (Format festival), Jeanne Mercier & Baptiste de Ville d’Avray (Afrique in visu), Aron Mörel (Mörel Books), Colin Pantall (writer/photographer), Martin Parr (photographer/curator), Max Pinckers (photographer), Damien Poulain (Oodee), Anna-Maria Pfab (Institute), Marc Prüst (consultant/curator), James Reid (Wallpaper), Olivier Richon (Royal College of Art), Arianna Rinaldo (Ojo de Pez/Cortona On The Move), Aaron Schuman (curator/lecturer), William Selden (photographer), Eugenie Shinkle (University of Westminster), Diane Smyth (BJP), Alec Soth (photographer/publisher), Ivan Vartanian (Goliga), Nick Waplington (photographer), James Wellford (photo editor/lecturer), Luis Weinstein (Valparaiso photo festival), Vanessa Winship (photographer) january 2014

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ones to watch

Isabelle Wenzel “I nominated Isabelle because her work is intelligent, imaginative, original and very funny,” says Eugénie Shinkle, lecturer and author of Fashion as Photograph. “She has drawn together performance art, sculpture, fashion and still life, with some shrewd feminist commentary and a wonderful eye for colour thrown in for good measure. And it’s clear she’s not just riffing on these diverse influences – she really understands how to make them all make sense as a photograph.”

This ability to get to the misogynist heart of popular culture using razor-sharp wit and measured intelligence is what makes Wenzel’s work stand out. In Positions, we see Wenzel clad in various fabrics, posing as a table. In different positions her bottom, her back and her heels become the table. Wenzel’s face is hidden; wrapped in chessboard pattern leggings, she becomes a colourful domestic fixture, an Allen Jones table, but with the woman struggling to twist free from the confines of her contorted body.

“What attracts me to her work is the way it cuts straight to the heart of female stereotyping in photography by reducing it to its most basic elements – caricature and display – and confronting the viewer with these elements in a really humorous way,” says Shinkle.

The references that Wenzel makes are also humorous and broad-based, with colour playing a major role. Different decades are referenced through the hue of the images, so we get a feel of the 1950s through a Norman Rockwell palette, something echoed by the tea-serving Stepford Wife styling of some of the positions.

Self-contained performance is at the heart of Wenzel’s pieces, which are made using a self-timer and repeated mad dashes to the place of composition; there will be up to 50 takes before she is satisfied. But flick through her Positions and Figures series, and odd references come up. Is that a William Klein I see before me, or a Richard Avedon or an Irving Penn?

What are Juergen Teller and Marc Jacobs doing in there? But these are not direct references, only little nudges and hints that point us in a certain direction.

The clever thing is these little nudges and hints, these disembodied body parts, are not so much depersonalised as part of a physically present persona (Wenzel trained as an acrobat) muscling up against her disembodied self. In Building Images, Wenzel shows this disembodied self in an office environment, where she strips herself down to basic body parts. Legs in secretarial nylons stick out of desks and filing cabinets in true Guy Bourdin style.

Yet for all the serious content, Wenzel still has a light touch. Shinkle says that in her work, “She presents the female body as a collection of fragmented erogenous zones – legs, hips, buttocks – that parodies fetishisation of these body parts in fashion and advertising imagery. Femininity is reduced to a cluster of highly conventional signifiers (skirt, tights, heels, undergarments) and stereotypical roles (housewife, secretary, pin–up). And she stages it all in a way that turns the look back on the viewer – presenting them with the mechanics of visual stereotyping, without being dour or didactic. It’s great.” BJP www.isabelle-wenzel.com

From Positions © Isabelle Wenzel january 2014

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Alvaro Laiz As a child, fascinated by the camera his dad would carry on holiday, Alvaro Laiz came to associate photography with travelling. So when he went to Uganda after finishing his studies in audiovisual communication at Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, it was only fitting that he took a camera along. “I photograph what I do not understand or what scares me,” he says. “I can’t think of anything more terrifying than the idea that a large part of our identity relies on facts and things we can’t control, and sometimes don’t even know exist.”

His quest took him to Mongolia, a state that lies between two domineering civilisations – China and Russia

– and which is in the midst of deep social transformation.

Researching the region’s nomadic tribes led him to consider the nation’s founder, Genghis Khan, who declared homosexuality illegal and punishable by death in a bid to increase the population. Eight hundred years later, little has been done to rehabilitate the community.

With Transmongolian, the Secret History of the Mongols [below], 33-year-old Laiz sheds light on the lives of the country’s transgenders, and seeks to restore some of their dignity – soft and majestic portraits of them in magnificent, traditionally female, garments contrast with candid shots of

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their nightly transvestite activities. “Every project has its own rhythm, but I usually like to begin with portraits,” he explains.

“It’s like shaking hands with someone you don’t know.”

For Arianna Rinaldo, director of Ojo de Pez, it’s this twopronged approach that sets Laiz’s project apart. “Alvaro easily and efficiently mixes the language of more classical reportage with staged portraits,” she notes. “He thus manages to deal with a subject that has been explored by many photographers in many countries with originality.”

Laiz, who founded the Madrid collective An-Hua [Chinese for “hidden image revealed when affecting a spotlight on it”],

continues to explore transgenderism in remote communities.

For Wonderland [above], he travelled to the Orinoco delta, for example, to find the indigenous Warao tribe, whose ancient animistic rites value those with dual gender. The coming year will see him explore Uganda, South Sudan and Congo in search of other lesser-known realities. “In a society where every second counts, photographs can reach deeper levels than anything else and therefore spread awareness,” he says. BJP

[Above] From Wonderland; [below] from Transmongolian, the Secret History of the Mongols © Alvaro Laiz

www.alvarolaiz.com

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Gilles Roudière “Gilles burst into my consciousness when I was judging a competition in September,” remembers Stephen Mayes, executive director of the Tim Hetherington Trust. “His Albanian study exploded with passion and vigour, which seems to flow effortlessly from frame to frame. He takes documentary to the realm of emotion and metaphor, with a rock-solid technique that never falters.”

A former company executive, Gilles Roudière left his job in 2005 to move to Germany and dedicate himself to a hobby that progressively turned into a passion. He learned everything by reading library books and studying photo agencies’ websites.

The day he became a photographer was the day he “stopped ‘understanding’ images, but ‘felt’ them instead”, he says.

The Berlin-based photographer is profoundly interested in what makes a ‘space’ a ‘place’, and has therefore grounded each of his projects so far in a defined territory. “What is

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37 ones to watch

From Shitet © Gilles Roudière

most important is how a locale is experienced, and the photographic translation of said experience, more than its straightforward depiction. I have no interest in objectivity.

I want to be as subjective as possible,” he says, comparing his practice to poems, especially haikus.

With Shitet (meaning ‘for sale’ in Albanian), Roudière wants to summon our guts more than our minds, creating a stark black-and-white portrait of the former communist republic, which borrows its visual codes from French photographer Klavdij Sluban and Japanese post-war photography. Roudière was aided by the country’s striking landscapes, kitsch urban décor and its harsh sunlight, which allowed him to create the high-contrast aesthetic he prefers.

“Deep blacks help construct an image,” he says. “They refine

it by highlighting what is essential and removing either the anecdotal or the overbearing narrative elements.”

This year he hopes to explore other areas outlined by unstable borders, such as Greece, Israel and Palestine, but he also wants to break free from these binds to create a transversal series, in which his vision becomes the sole thread.

“I have more than 400 rolls of undeveloped film lying at home,” he reveals. “From these a project should evolve that defies geographical ties, and thus an appreciation of an intuitive approach to photography emerges.” BJP www.gillesroudiere.com

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Charlie Engman As Bruno Ceschel puts it, Charlie Engman is something of an accidental fashion photographer: “He hasn’t always dreamed of being in the fashion world. It just so happens that the fashion world is facilitating the things he’s interested in,” says the founder of Self Publish Be Happy, who nominated him for this issue.

Having started out studying Japanese and Korean at Oxford University, Engman began making what he calls small picture notes, little sketches of things. “The photography that developed out of this was very much on the fine art side of things, but much of the overarching subject matter spoke to fashion – texture, gesture, materials, issues of volume and flatness. I befriended a handbag designer when I moved to New York, and she asked me to photograph her look book. This was my first foray into fashion, and it sort of snowballed from there.”

The New York-based photographer soon landed a commission from Urban Outfitters to shoot its autumn 2011 catalogue. He went on to do two more campaigns for the label and has since shot commissions for Hermès, Lacoste and Kenzo, as well as editorial assignments for

magazines including AnOther, Dazed & Confused and American Vogue. But perhaps the most interesting was his story for Hungarian magazine The Room, featuring his mother as his muse. “I’m still figuring out how to talk about them, and what exactly they mean to me,” says Engman, who’d photographed her before and been “really impressed with the way she transformed herself for the camera, and the ability of the photograph to make something so familiar to me feel so strange”.

The proposal to use her in a fashion shoot came about when the magazine’s editor was visiting the photographer in New York, where she met Engman senior and the idea was floated. “I had never seen my mother wear heels, and she had only worn minimal make-up on the rarest of occasions, so the transformation was even more strange and pronounced in those pictures. I became really interested in the idea of using my mother as a visual or manipulatable material and what that could mean; playing dress-up in Mom’s clothes, only in the reverse order.” BJP www.charlieengman.com january 2014

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[Top row] From MOM; [right] from Fashion II; [below] from Sketchbook Š Charlie Engman

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Cemil Batur Gökçeer “What is interesting about the way he works is that it is in part an investigation, but completely at the mercy of his own personal interaction with what unfolds,” says George Georgiou, who was one of the Turkish photographer’s teachers on a yearlong workshop run by the International Summer School of Photography, along with his partner Vanessa Winship.

“There is an element of accident in his photography that he totally embraces.”

In his work, Gökçeer will intuitively switch materials and techniques to allow, as Georgiou puts it, “interference to surface on the image”. This accidental element is evident in Tangle, in which a fictional investigation into a murder develops as a stream of consciousness in

a series of images that take us into the psychological Badlands of Central Anatolia.

The story unfolds from a murder mystery that begins when a woman goes missing. After three days, her body is found in a pit of snow, her death said to be the result of a love affair with a genie. But Gökçeer worked out that the ‘spiritual genie’ was a ruse to keep secret what had really happened – a secret that would shame the community, and possibly result in the punishment of the woman’s actual murderers.

As it says in an introduction to Tangle: “It seemed as if everyone knew of the crime, but to maintain the community’s dignity it was wrapped in mystique to obscure what needed to stay concealed

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in the dark.” Gökçeer had planned to explore the culture and geography of Central Anatolia, but upon hearing this murder story he soon found himself tangled in a web of intrigue.

And intrigue is precisely what he photographs in Tangle. The project starts with a simple landscape; we see what appears to be a dried-up lake, its bed cracked; only a few patches of dampness remain. Gökçeer moves from landscape into villages – isolated dwellings covered in a blanket of snow, places where dark things happen, where everyone knows the secrets that must remain forever hidden.

Black-and-white goes to colour, prints are ripped and scratched. As Gökçeer continues his investigations, people

appear out of cars, with their backs turned. We see what looks like a mortuary slab. Male prowess looms large in the series – in the cafes, on the street. A man raises his middle finger at Gökçeer, another is on a prayer mat, praying to Allah, perhaps for guidance or forgiveness.

Tangle is more about a mood than an explanation – an examination of what lies beneath the genie stories. “His work attempts to recreate and respond to his experience,” says Winship. “Sometimes he turns the camera on himself, sometimes he approaches themes and subjects that are apparently intangible, often complex, and difficult to grapple with photographically.” BJP www.cemilbaturgokceer.com

From Tangle, 2010-12 © Cemil Batur Gökçeer

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All images © Mathieu Cesar

Mathieu Cesar The aesthetic may be classic, but the approach is resolutely contemporary, and that mix has seduced some of the biggest players in the fashion world – from the former editor of Vogue Paris, Carine Roitfeld (who now has her own magazine, CR) to Christian Lacroix. “Referencing past masters of the fashion image in the simplicity of his contrasted composition, Mathieu Cesar subverts the classical genre by capturing a contemporary generation of beautiful and damned subjects in sometimes surreal scenes that somehow manage to feel uncontrived,” says another fan, Anne BourgeoisVignon, creative content director at Nowness, who nominated him for this issue. “His photographs of models, musicians and assorted cool kids flirt with emotion and raw beauty, and his subjects blend arrogance and vulnerability.”

A former hairdresser, Cesar got his break with a short film he made of his brother, the ballet dancer Jean-Sébastien Colau. For two months, the French cinema chain MK2 showed the documentary before every feature. He quit his job, joined a production company, and within six weeks was in Mongolia

on assignment for Louis Vuitton. “They asked me to shoot videos and photos. That’s when I realised I preferred still images,” he says. “Unlike motion pictures, which involve a lot of equipment and many people, photography is just my camera, the set, the subject and I. It becomes easier for me to create the fantasies that I have in mind and, also, to share a moment with the person in front of the lens.”

He draws inspiration from images he saw as a child. “My mother sold old books. I grew up surrounded by historical etchings and illustrations from the 1930s and ’40s. The ideas that I’ve turned into photographs come to me quite naturally.” So far, he has applied his aesthetic vision to shooting the likes of Daft Punk, Milla Jovovich, Natalia Vodianova and the upcoming Yves St Laurent campaign.

Thankful that he has been able to concentrate on commissions that correspond to his own aesthetic vision, Cesar hopes to spend more time on personal projects in 2014. But far from slowing down, he wants to produce a book and an exhibition. “I’ll rest when I die,” he says. BJP www.mathieucesar.com JANUARY 2014

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ones to watch

Wasma Mansour Since moving from Saudi Arabia to the UK in 2007, Wasma Mansour has turned her lens towards other women who have made a similar choice. Single Saudi Women takes an almost scientific approach to the ways in which these émigrés evolve in contemporary British society through three carefully crafted typologies – portraits of the women in their homes, still lifes of significant objects shot in their homes, and studio images of veils packed in bags, shown here.

“In the past, my awareness of photography had been limited to its use as an illustrative tool and as a means for providing visual evidence,” explains Mansour, who is currently completing a PhD in photography at London College of

Communication. “Through collaborating with the participants when building their portraits, I became increasingly aware of the need to protect their anonymity. This led me to further revise and expand my use of photography.”

Rather than imposing a personal view on how her subjects should be depicted, Mansour enters into a dialogue with each, involving them in the process – from setting the 4×5 camera to proofing the Polaroid test before taking the final image. Many are portrayed in their bedrooms, often facing the window, and gazing out. The objects in the rooms only hint at their emotional landscape: family photos suggest longing; an orange suitcase, frequent travel; a Gucci shopping

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From A package, of a package, of a package © Wasma Mansour

bag, economic status. In the still lifes, these objects take on still more importance. “I am interested in photographs that reveal intimacy and trust between the photographer and subject,” says Mansour, who also includes written notes and photographs taken by the participants in her project.

“Within a Middle Eastern context, a commodity such as a veil has been very powerful,” the photographer writes by way of introduction to the still lifes, “becoming transfixed as a symbol synonymous with oppression, backwardness, weakness etcetera. In reality, however, it might be a personal choice (as in Egypt), a religious duty (Iran), a socio-religious obligation (Saudi Arabia), or a sign of resistance (Algeria). And yet for the

women I worked with, the veil is something they own but do not use... In displacing the garment [and shooting it in a studio], I aimed to free it from its socio-religious connotations and transform it to an object imbued with symbolism.”

“Mansour is transparent and responsible, constantly aiming to mediate in her images the multifariousness of the participants’ individual lives,” says Hester Keijser, the writer and curator who selected her work for the fourth edition of Photoquai, and for this issue. “These are skills that benefit women growing up in societies like Saudi Arabia, where there is a need to answer for one’s movements on a daily basis.” BJP www.wmansour.com

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