Issue N° 03 Ying Ang Valeria Cherchi Gregory Collavini Philippe Fragnière Anthony Gerace Cemil Batur Gökçeer Bernhard Handick Alessandro Imbriaco Morvarid K Margo Ovcharenko
21 august 2013
From the series Back to School by Philippe Fragnière
From the series A Place in the Sun by Alessandro Imbriaco
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Imprint / Comment & Notes
PUBLISHER Yet magazine, Editorial offices Lugano, Switzerland London, UK T +41 (0) 78 838 25 17 info@yet-magazine.com www. yet-magazine.com YET MAGAZINE #03 Editor-in-chief Salvatore Vitale Managing Editor Francesca Wilkins Photo Editors Ilaria Crosta Salvatore Vitale Art direction Nicolas Polli Graphic design Jonathan Giani Nicolas Polli Translations Francesca Wilkins Web designer Davide Morotti Social Media Editor Giulia Giani INSIDE ISSUE 03 Front Cover Philippe Fragnière Alessandro Imbriaco Back Cover Bernhard Handick Contributors Ying Ang Amber aka Bracket Valeria Cherchi Gregory Collavini Jillian Edelstein Philippe Fragnière Anthony Gerace Cemil Batur Gökçeer Bernhard Handick Alessandro Imbriaco Morvarid K Margo Ovcharenko Camilla Pongiglione COPYRIGHT Yet Magazine, 2013 All rights reserved.
Summer is the time in which, in a certain sense, one escapes from everyday life: we travel, expand our knowledge, our culture, our habits. From this, new stories and new ideas are born. And not long before the end of this season, we present our “summer issue”. As always, this issue doesn’t have a set theme, but is rich with photography series and content which delves deeper and deeper into the world of photography – work which doesn’t claim to provide answers, but instead raises questions or simply reflects on different approaches and different modus operandi. In the history of mankind there have always been, and will forever be, writers, scientists, painters, musicians, pioneers and people who, with their contribution, open paths to new perceptions of the world. We aim
The publisher assumes no responsability for the accurancy of all the information. Publisher and editor assume the material that material that was made available for publishing, is free of third party rights. Reproduction and storage require the permission of the publisher. Photos and texts are welcome, but there is no liability. Signed contributions do not necessarily represent the opinion of the publisher or the editor.
No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher. All reasonable efforts have been made to identify and contact copyright holders, but in some cases these could not be traced.
Comment & Notes
our attention towards photographers, to those people who create images. In a certain sense, we offer them to the public, while at the same time respecting, as always, the personality of each individual which can be seen in their own photographs. Since we first started we’ve been continously observing and reflecting, leading us to create an ever-changing, ever more broad vision of things. What you see in this issue fully reflects this vision. With each new edition we continue to give you new content, introduce you to new artists and present to you photography series which have been receiving a lot of critical attention. Meanwhile, in return we’ve also come into closer contact with the art world, by observing things which rise and evolve, by participating at exhibitions and international festivals, and by creating our own events to offer an outlook to artists who have or will collaborate with us. This is our way of presenting to you something which drives us, bringing you closer to the photographers that we feature, starting from their images.
Salvatore Vitale Francesca Wilkins
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YET magazine
by Cemil Batur Gökçeer
Photography Classics: Optic Nerve, Arno Rafael Minkkinen at Les Rencontres D’Arles by Camilla Pongiglione
Editorial
Exhibition
Cave Albino
From pp. 08— 21
From pp. 22— 23
i used to. by Valeria Cherchi
Editorial
From pp. 24— 55
Male Nudes by Margo Ovcharenko
Editorial
From pp. 56— 67
A Place in the Sun
Interview
Say Hello to the Future
with Jillian Edelstein
by Anthony Gerace
by Alessandro Imbriaco
Interview
Editorial
Editorial
From pp. 68— 73
From pp. 74— 83
From pp. 84— 105
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Contents
The Silent Outlook
Fragmentation
Heart Dish
with Ying Ang
by Morvarid K
by Gregory Collavini
Editorial
Editorial
Editorial
From pp. 106— 138
From pp. 138— 153
From pp. 154— 171
Back to School A Day With Amber aka Bracket
by Philippe Fragnière
Interview
Editorial
From pp. 172— 179
Who is it
From pp. 180— 189
A View on Self Publishing:
by Bernhard Handick
Lugemik, Estonia
Editorial
Interview
From pp. 190— 199
From pp. 200— 203
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YET magazine
Cave Albino by Cemil Batur Gรถkรงeer
Editorial
Cave Albino Photographs and text by Cemil Batur Gökçeer
www.cemilbaturgokceer.com
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It takes millions of years for the texture of a cave to form. Now, illuminated with colourful lights, its darkness and silence diminished, transformed into a tour ist attraction, it does not lose its strongly immersive atmosphere. But trapped underneath the surface of that atmosphere one finds an intervention made of light, music, colour and tourists. To interrupt the feeling of intensity mixed with fear, and to photograph myself in the cave - or to leave the cave and find myself on a beach…
To me, all this was like a game of heroism. In order to imitate the cave’s texture on the negatives, I developed my images using a dripping method, thus damaging the surface of the photographs. I was attempting to bring this story to life, somewhere on the surface, to establish a photographic language that contends with its depth.
From pp. 8---21
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YET magazine
Photography Classics: Optic Nerve, Arno Rafael Minkkinen at Les Rencontres D’Arles Text by Camilla Pongiglione
Translation by Francesca Wilkins
In the burning expanse of the ateliers, seven rooms retrace the compositions which Arno Rafael Minkkinen has been imagining and creating for forty years now. Self-portraits in which the Finnish photographer places his body in an absolute, often solemn nature, where the nudity of the subject erases any reference to time. Perfectly balanced blacks and whites that reflect the disconcerting equilibrium between the images’ powerful tension and serenity. The poetry of a flexible body which plays with the spaces, completes them, taking them over. Minkkinen experiments with, challenges the force of gravity. This justifies his choice to not represent anyone other than himself: “I photograph myself so no one else comes in harm’s way; I could not ask someone to lean over a cliff just a bit more”. The only exceptions are his son Dan and various female figures, which delicately accompany the dance of his body.
Exhibition
Unexpected, striking images, charged with an energy saturated with an intelligence which breaks the mould. He recounts that one morning, as he leant back on a dock behind him, wanting to lay down his camera, he realised that he could twist his torso horizontally, following the instinct of an ordinary gesture, or bend himself backwards – subverting pre-established movements. “To aim the camera back toward the self is not necessarily an act of self-portraiture. There are other purposes served by such practice. When I enter the image that I see in the viewfinder, it is as if I am stepping into an empty room. I operate in this manner because I want to discover what happens at the moment of exposure without seeing it happen, so that the result can be a surprise”. Stepping into an empty room. A black box in which nature and man enter after the composition has been accurately planned, becoming immortalised without any alteration. A black box of the camera, the black box of the mind – “What happens inside your mind, can happen inside the camera,” he writes. Minkkinen is not only a remarkable photographer and printmaker, but also an
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exceptional teacher. I met him for the first time in Tuscany. He was the last to turn up at the station. To me he seemed extremely tall. A long silhouette with silver hair. I watched those slender legs as he dragged a large suitcase which stumbled through the gravel. And then his calm voice which strangely enough suited the lively scurrying of his eyes. I noticed his baseball cap and his magician-like gestures. He adored my grandfather’s Fiat Uno with the wooden steering wheel, in which I went to go meet him. As I drove, out of the corner of my eye I noticed he was looking at me. I felt uncomfortable. Then, during that week, I learned from him the ability to observe the world with constant curiosity and wonder. He taught me the importance of finding confidence in one’s own ideas*. I felt the desire to live with a visceral ardour, and I think I’m still trying to do so, both in photography and in my life.
*I recommend reading Minkkinen’s “Helsinki bus station” theory, http:// petapixel.com/2013/03/13/the-helsinki-busstation-theory-finding-your-own-vision-inphotography/
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i used to. Photographs by Valeria Cherchi Text by Elisabetta Masala
www.poveralice.it
From pp. 24---73
i used to. by Valeria Cherchi
Editorial
The eternal and the ephemeral, past and future, melancholy and devotion: i used to. represents a state of tension between opposites that come together in harmonious union. This is a project which, through photography and fashion, celebrates the bond between the artist and her memory, driven by an inspiration directly linked to old memories and to a feeling of nostalgia for her homeland. Valeria Cherchi was born in Sardinia, and has been dedicating herself to photography for years. Her project, i used to. - initially conceived as a fashion editorial, is set in Sardinia, in the evocative atmosphere of the places of her childhood and adolescence. Here, traditional Sardinian costumes have been skilfully combined with recent creations by local designers including Antonio Marras and Giani Serra. But these fashion photographs soon become entwined with suggestions in which distant thoughts coexist in an outcome of immediate visual impact. And suddenly old family photographs re-emerge, together with personal images of the artist, tied to recent and to older memories, transforming the act of photography into a deeply introspective journey across time and space. Considering fashion as an fleeting social phenomenon, because of its affiliation with a rapidly evolving market, Valeria’s choice appears all the more unusual: not only does she
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use photography as a tool to promote new styles clothes and accessories, but she creates an intimate connection with self-knowledge and its relationship with memory. The root of the term “nostalgia” derives from Greek, and is etymologically linked to a feeling of pain. However, the concept of nostalgia, inherent in this work, doesn’t necessarily imply a negative connotation. In Valeria Cherchi’s i used to. we can find a disposition akin to Panofsky’s Saturn and Melancholy, inclined to evoke creative stimuli by reviving distant emotions. But how does one evoke a personal memory - faded yet at the same time vivid - through a still and silent image? Valeria takes up this challenge, drawing inspiration from the most diverse areas of knowledge: from Gaston Bachelard and Friedrich Schiller’s philosophy, from silent Japanese cinema and the films of David Lynch, to the photography of Nan Goldin, Irina Werning and David Favrod. Many years have gone by since this photographer left Sardinia to move first to Rome, then to Edinburgh and, ultimately, to London; yet, this distance, this special bond with her native land, remains a constant presence, a guide in her working method and in her inspiration. i used to. is a complex project, a full immersion in a place made up of memories; an exploration free from the traditional dictates of fashion photography which acquires a deeply poetic meaning.
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i used to. by Valeria Cherchi
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Male Nudes Photographs and text by Margo Ovcharenko
www.margoovcharenko.com
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Male Nudes by Margo Ovcharenko
Editorial
The pictures that you’re looking at are combined from two series of mine, but have one thing in common: this is a young woman taking pictures of men. To take pictures of someone naked is always like being a voyeur, like being too indifferent to actually act. It’s the most melancholic way of looking at people. When I received my very first professional camera I was fifteen years old and very shy. And of course, I understood right away that I can interact with people much more easily when I’m with my camera. A few years later, I attended a workshop with Boris Mikhailov in which he said that the first time he showed any interest in photography was the same time at which he showed interest in women. And this is very true for me too. It’s not like I pretend that I want to take pictures of a man or a women when I’m actually only attracted to them. It is the strangest feeling that drives me. I want to show how a body feels, not what it looks like. How a person feels about his or herself, the way in which a viewer looks at a person in the way a scientist or a researcher looks at an artefact. It’s showing something really private to the public, like in feeling no shame at all when walking with your grandmother through a museum full of nudity.
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The Hermitage series was aimed to show something about Russian mentality, which I guess is initially connected to orthodox Christianity. We think that beauty comes through suffering. There is also a saying, “no beating, no love”, which for a young generation supposedly justifies domestic violence, and also makes it look more poetic. I was trying to show physical and mental abuse in the way a frustrated youngster sees it: a little romantic, a little shocking and very much simply like something that’s always been that way. The second series was made for a magazine called Headmaster. My assignment was to create a series of eight to twelve photographs exploring the metaphorical relationship between the human body and various pieces of furniture. Ideally, I wanted the viewer to see what I try to work on when I take nude pictures: the ambivalent emotions that are so common for young people in love, for which they can’t be judged. A contradiction which can be found in beauty: some care and patience, softness, and the fragility of a body which you can almost feel when you look at the pictures.
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Interview with Jillian Edelstein by Francesca Wilkins
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Jillian Edelstein is a Londonbased photographer who has captured the likes of Yoko Ono, Nelson Mandela, Damien Hirst, Allen Ginsberg and countless other notable figures. Having started her career through photojournalism, she has documented the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in her native South Africa. Her portfolio ranges from large format portraits to press photographs shot digitally or on film, blurring the lines between what is portraiture and what is documentary. Jillian’s photography is characterised by a humane approach to her subAffinities: jects which comes across truly vividly in her work. While Damien Hirst and Jay Jopling at a first glance the images may present themselves as traditional portraits, underneath the surface one senses a deep, almost personal connection with each subject which is anything but straightforward to achieve, given the variety of her subjects’ backgrounds and the variety of situations which Jillian has captured. Hers are portraits that tell a story, often only suggested by subtle details in the image. Recently she has photographed the creative minds behind the 2012 Olympic Games and is revisiting an old body of work which delves into the idea of personal affinity and partnership within the arts world. Her work has been featured in renowned publications worldwide. I met Jillian in her elegant north London home, which occasionally doubles as a studio, and spoke to her about her recent projects.
Interview
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Looking back through your portfolio, there’s a particular series of black and white portraits which stands out on both visually and on a conceptual level. In Affinities, you asked a variety of influential cultural individuals to pick out a creative collaborator, and then photographed them together. You first started this project twenty years ago, but in recent months have chosen to revisit this body of work. Can you tell me a little about where the idea came from, both in the beginning, and in choosing to continue the series now?
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Affinities is a project I began in the early nineties, I continued it until it was exhibited in ’94, so I must have worked on it for nearly five years. This new work is a revisitation and a continuation - a bringing it up to speed. How it came about the second time was that I was looking for a project - I always think that projects begin because you’re searching - and at the beginning of this year I was looking through some old documents of mine (I’m a hoarder, I’m sure many photographers are). I found faxes from Willem Dafoe and Jeff Koons, letters from Eve Arnold and Jeanette Winterson… And after that I started looking at the work (all on 4x5 film, as I’d started exploring large format photography at the time), and I thought, this has never been published – why not? So I started to call up one or two of these people and asked them: if you had another chance to be photographed now, would you choose the same person again? So it became this thing of bringing it up to speed, of using film as well as digital, and combining all these things. I’ll Affinities: Jeff Koons and bust of Louis XIV
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Road to 2012: Cecil Balmond
be photographing a lot of the same subjects, but also lots of new, and younger people. I’ll also be filming interviews with them. I chose to crowdfund the project and over 100 people have backed me, so there’s obviously a ground swell of support for it. In having each subject choose their collaborator, would you say you’re exploring the idea of partnership, of personal support for artists? Naturally what happens is that lots of people are quite deliberate about who to choose
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because it’s very hard to choose one person. It’s about supporting the arts, about collaborations and about the fact that that most artists work alone but there’s always somebody supporting them. It’s quite hard to photograph two people. Often I was in situations in which I felt like a voyeur, or I felt slightly alienated. There’s an intimacy between two people and you’re the outsider looking in, trying to make a photograph or a record that isn’t too contrived, that shows that close relationship… Sangoma Healers
Interview
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and then there’s the challenge of doing it uniquely and differently. Yet in your work you often find ways to do things uniquely, differently. For example, in the series of commissioned portraits you took for the Olympic Games, Road to 2012, you captured a variety of people - each in a set space with its own atmosphere, so that every image tells us something about that person. How did that all come together? When I was asked to photograph the producers of the Olympic Games, my thought was, this could look awfully corporate and editorial-like, but I wanted it to look almost like film stills… so that each image has a story, and that’s how I treated each one. I did a lot of research before each photoshoot. There was a lot of thought behind each image, the space and the location and how it figured in each person’s world in the context of the games. Many were associated with the location they were rehearsing or working in. Stephen Daldry, for example, was the consulting director for the closing and opening ceremonies, so his portrait was taken in the Three Mills Studios. I wanted each one to have some kind of reference that brought it finally into the heart of the games. In a way you were documenting the preparations for this event, so one could almost see this project as something between portraiture and documentary photography. Obviously you do a bit of both - do you have a connection between the two? Is your working method different depending on whether you’re taking portraits or documentary photographs? I think whether I like it or not I bring both to whichever situation I’m working in, and that’s simply because my background is documentary. My “biographical” background in a sense is seated in politics, and that political background somehow frames anything else that I do, whether it’s portrait or whether it’s fashion… There will always be both frames of reference regarding my work. You’ve photographed such a great variety of people, with different backgrounds and different lifestyles – does your approach change
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depending on whom you’re photographing? I’ve never been formulaic. Obviously with Road to 2012 for example, the way of operating, the way of looking at how I was going to do it, was very much decided beforehand. So mostly I try to have planned ideas, but I might shift them in the moment. With photography you can’t dispute or deny the fact that the location, or the mood, or other factors beyond your control will be in play. …And would you say that different types of people have different approaches in front of the camera? It’s very much a two way process, it’s what you drive out of the person, what you coax out of them. Because I’m creating a relationship with the subject, the atmosphere always varies. It depends on what they’re bringing to the moment - you don’t know, for example an actor might arrive to be photographed having just come out of a lousy audition… Everybody, including me, comes to it with a different kind of mood and aspect and if you don’t play to that then you can get stuck and it can affect the kind of photograph you’re going to take. Recently I was photographing Philip Glass for the Affinities project and he mentioned a quote by Walker Evans: “The secret of photography is, the camera takes on the character and personality of the handler”. There’s no formula, there’s no trick, there’s no method. I really do believe that it’s about how you are interfacing with the people that you’re photographing.
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Interview
Sangoma Healers
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Say Hello to the Future by Anthony Gerace
Editorial
Say Hello to the Future Photographs and text by Anthony Gerace
www.a-gerace.com
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In June 2012, over the course of three days, I printed through a pack of thirty-year-old Kodak fibre paper that I’d found at a darkroom contents sale. The first several prints I made led to a certain frustration: the tonal range had been halved, in places the chemistry was burning through the paper, there were stains and fogging that I couldn’t account for. But as I kept printing (and I was purposely printing as quickly as I could) it occurred to me that this paper, and the results I was getting from it, served both as a metaphor for the previous year’s work (all of the prints were residuals from a portrait series I’d begun in 2011), and for darkroom printing itself.
Through their imperfections, ghostly tonalities and damage, they took on the quality of memories.
From pp. 76---85
The images are insubstantial and faded and “wrong”, conscious of photography’s inability to accurately record history, an inability on par with our own. And through their temporal layering - thirty-year-old paper being used to print year-old portraits in a matter of seconds - they speak to our attempts to hold on to our history, and the way in which history changes the more we engage with it. Say Hello to the Future is a selection of those prints.
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A Place in the Sun Generoso conquering a place in the sun and back by Alessandro Imbriaco
Editorial
A Place in the Sun Photographs and text by Alessandro Imbriaco
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In 1937 Generoso Imbriaco volounteered for service in Eastern Africa; he returned in 1947. My grandfather never spoke much about that period, and
www.alessandroimbriaco.com
the only things remaining from his years in Africa are a frame with some medals, a photograph and some love poems. This is a project based on a farmer’s colonial experience in Africa in the 1940s or it would be more correct to say that it will be, and that this is the beginning, a cataloguing of things and people that Generoso saw in the colonial forces.
From pp. 84---105
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A Place in the Sun by Alessandro Imbriaco
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Focus On
Fragmentation With Ying Ang and the editorial team
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Ying Ang Runaway
“They elevated me from all littleness of feeling; and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquilised it. In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts over which it had brooded for the last month. I retired to rest at night; my slumbers, as it were, waited on and ministered to by the assemblance of grand shapes which I had contemplated during the day. They congregated around me; the unstained snowy mountain top, the glittering pinnacle, the pine woods, and ragged bare ravine, the eagle, soaring amidst the clouds – they all gathered around me and bade me be at peace.� (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein) www.yingangphoto.com
Photographs and text by Ying Ang
Fragmentation
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The flight from neighbourhood demons. I strike out into unfamiliar terrain, mountains of obscurity and nameless faces in a similar migration to my own. Veiled, probing questions over cheap cups of coffee. Sun-blasted truck-stops in the middle of the Mojave punctuate the streaming barren landscape. I drive from the desert to the sea, across alpine ridges, high sierra lakes, passing all manner of lost souls along the way. Disappearing souls who don’t want to be found; where being found denotes a return to a place they never wanted to be in the first place. Instead, the mask of the wandering stranger, observing from afar the fragments that make up the lives of others: Salvation, intimacy, fear, doubt. If you’re reading this, I’m still on the run.
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Fragmentation
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Fragmentation A group of workmen on a scaffolding truck are pasting up the last of the displays, a hundred-foot-long panel that appears to represent a section of a sand-dune. Looking at it more closely, one realises that in fact it is an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest. The white volumes of the room extend themselves around subject and observer as the photographer captures a sequence of enlarged details of anatomical parts. The Atrocity Exhibition presents a series of recurring images which include immensely magnified fragments of female bodies, repeatedly compared to white sand-dunes, or to formal geometric patterns found in the repeated modules of modern architecture. Body and landscape interchange freely, as they are interpreted in relation to the space around them. The photographer recreates this scenario following a more delicate, more poetic interpretation of the book, in a key not quite as crude as Ballard’s original imagery. These images are fragments in a terminal moraine left behind by the passage through consciousness. They include: (1) the angle between two walls, (2) the folds of the white sheet of an unmade bed, (3) the flattening effect of the scanned negatives diminishing the identity of the young woman. Through the camera, the photographer plays with perception and reduces everything to an abstract, two-dimensional world, in which absence becomes presence and vice versa. The resulting work, like the book, is open to different levels of interpretation.
This series of photographs is but a mere starting point for a larger project loosely based on recurring visual elements and concepts within J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition. The accompanying text was written taking different fragments from the book, rearranged and edited in part using the cut-up technique.
Fragmentation
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Fragmentation
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Architomy of a portrait
Hair / Sight Bulb / Sight Identity / Touch / Sight
Hole / Throat / Motivation Erection / Equilibrium / Power Birth / Instinct / Sight
Periphery / End
Clone.
Fragmentation
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Fragments of… From the cellular division of chromosomes, character is born. From chaos, stars are born. Division, implosion, chaos, disorder, division, fusion,
fragmentation.
Something so small it can’t be seen, yet so big it can’t be imagined. Images seen through a microscope or through a telescope?
They merge together in a web representing similar systems of births, of lives, of worlds. When it seems that man and cosmos really do share the same instruction manual.
Fragmentation
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Heart Dish by Morvarid K
Editorial
Heart Dish Photographs and text by Morvarid K
www.morvarid-photography.com
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Tehran’s rooftops are adorned with millions of satellite dishes which receive television broadcasts in Farsi from overseas. In a restrained society where national media is heavily regulated, these foreign satellite transmissions are one of the few uncensored sources of information, opinion and entertainment available to Iranians. Although satellite dishes were officially outlawed in 1994, Tehranees continue to install them clandestinely. The Iranian government in turn routinely engages in “satellite jamming�, saturating the airwaves with enough noise to interfere with satellite transmissions. While no official data exists, many suspect that this noise also causes significant physical harm, with reports of women terminating their pregnancies as far as five months in, when the hearts of their unborn babies fail to develop properly. Each collage in Heart Dish is composed of rust-coloured satellite dishes set against the metallic rooftop textures in Tehran, arranged in compositions recalling geometric patterns typical in Iran. At first glance, the images are unassuming and harmlessly pretty. A closer inspection reveals real hearts at the centre of each dish, seemingly connected to the network of cables, bringing to the surface the invisible process of relentless damage to a society.
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The Silent Outlook Photographs and text by Gregory Collavini
www.gregorycollavini.com
From pp. 150---167
The Silent Outlook by Gregory Collavini
Editorial
Considering that landscape is a human invention, conceived to be either a concrete or an imaginary transfiguration of the land - also called Artialisation by Alain Roger - I based my research on ideologies related to town planning and landscape management. An analysis of the landscape reveals that some state constructions could lead to harmful effects such as landscape and population control. I give particular emphasis to the case of Switzerland because its exiguity generates this intense control of territory. Being claustrophobic myself, I feel particularly affected by this situation. The work shown here concerns noise reduction walls, which are erected almost everywhere on the territory in order to provide phonetic isolation to specific locations. These constructions remit from a political intention that is essentially positive, notably to protect people from annoying noises caused by highway traffic. They have nevertheless an opposite effect, which is to delimit and to contain the landscape, transforming it from a smooth into a striated space - using the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari. On a more metaphorical level, these constructions could be seen as signs of a country shutting itself in.
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My goal is to represent a modern topography of Switzerland. I use these walls as a pretext to illustrate my own vision of the Swiss landscape. I work with a 4x5 camera, as I think it’s important to see details where everything must be set to millimetre precision. Due to its good financial position, the Swiss government is able to build a lot of these walls. So money is also an important feature. For instance in the film La Zona by Rodrigo Plå, we can see a rich neighbourhood living beside poor people. The rich build a wall all around their houses for their security, they have their own neighbourhood laws, they manage their own security system and produce their own power. These inhabitants don’t want to pay taxes to the government as they have created their own country. During my research I found a lot of places I would like to discover and am convinced that not only is this subject important for the legacy of Switzerland, but it is also an important part of the landscape of this country.
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The Silent Outlook by Gregory Collavini
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A Day With: Amber aka Bracket
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Interview
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A Day With In A Day With, we focus on a particular artist’s creative process. Through images and through words, they grant us insight into their world.
Amber, known online as Bracket, is a young London-based photographer who captures scenes of ordinary life working with a variety of both analogue and digital cameras. In essence, her portfolio is made up of extremely colourful images of day-to-day scenarios, ranging from personal snapshots taken in her home to photographs of strangers on the street. When viewed together as a whole, her work creates a colourful mosaic made of cityscapes, shop windows, sunsets, tattoos, domestic animals, confectionary, graffiti, and a number of self-portraits. Through one photograph and the next runs a personal narrative which expresses a down to earth joie de vivre. Her beautifully simple images of the quotidian have gained popularity across the internet, thanks to image sharing communities and her own website. We asked Amber to tell us about her work and share with us a few images to represent her personal approach towards photography.
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Interview with Amber aka Bracket by Francesca Wilkins Is being a photographer an essential part of who you are as a person? Being a photographer is a tool that helps me express things rather than being an essential part of who I am, just like some people use writing or drawing or any other method in order to do so, I just happened to pick up a camera and found that it’s the right tool for me. I’d still be the same person even if you take away my camera - I would just have to find a new way to express myself. Most of your photographs are essentially snippets of your life: portraits of your friends or yourself, your cats, your home and the streets around you, market stalls, cafés, shop windows,… Yet there’s definitely something unique about your work. What do you think it is about your photographs that people love so much? I’m really struggling with this question, always have been. It’s just this little hobby of mine that somehow along the years
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became much more than that, and the love I get from my audience still leaves me quite stunned sometimes, especially when I get messages from people telling me I’m their role model and how important my work is to them etc. It’s always quite weird…. I’m just a girl who takes photos. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to point out that something which makes my work unique, but I guess the fact that I’ve been doing that “thing” I do for many years now is a part of it.
>
In the past I used to do a lot of “themed” photography and conceptual work was my main thing, but at some point I kinda grew out of it, maybe I wanted things to be more simple, less planned - which led me to eventually start shooting the way I am shooting today. I’d say my work these days is much more casual than it used to be. I still do concepts but it’s all about capturing my daily life and the things around me these days. I don’t follow any trends, I’m not trying to be something that I’m not, my photography is honest and I guess many people can relate to it and even see themselves in it. I’m very down to earth and easy to talk to, and I help a numerous amount of people who are interested in my work and who are struggling in life. Mostly younger people. They write to me a lot and I guess if my photography
Loading up a Kodak Portra 400 into my Hasselblad.
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and words help them, then I’m probably doing something good. What relationship do you have with your subjects - whether they’re close friends or strangers on the street? I’m so fascinated by and emotionally drawn to shooting people I love and that are close to me, that the outcomes tend to be very intimate and unique, because there is always a fair amount of feelings involved when I shoot them, this is also the main reason why I don’t tend to shoot strangers often… I just lack this connection with the subject, which makes me less interested in them. Your photographs are also a sort of documentary on the world around you, a wander through the city you live in. What’s your relationship with London?
> Calculating the light with the >
built-in light meter inside my head and taking a picture
After having developed the negatives from a day out shooting: scanning them at home using my Epson V700 scanner.
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Forever wanderlust, I tend to have a strong desire to capture the essence of the places I’m living in, which is something that changes quite often as I move around a lot. I’ve only been living in London for the past couple of years or so, but fell madly in love with its magical dynamics. I have a strong love/hate relationship with London, this place gets
to you, changes you, and basically everything about this city just fascinates me and move things inside me, I guess I’m trying to convey all these feelings when I shoot around the city streets. On your website you state: “I’m a little obsessed with documentation and creation, and ever so fascinated by colours, shapes and light” - when you mention “colours, shapes and light”, it’s as though you have an almost childlike approach to the things around you, and this simplicity translates ever so beautifully in your images… Where would you say your desire to capture these
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scenes of everyday life comes from? I’ve had this obsession for documenting my life ever since I’ve had memory of myself. Even as a young teenager, I used to write diaries and collect letters and all sorts of bits from life events, and neatly tuck them into big catalogued folders, as if to create a detailed archive of my life. When I was first introduced to photography and picked up my first camera, it was like I had discovered a whole new, more efficient way of capturing my life visually. I want to be that old grandma who sits with her grandchildren over a gigantic pile of memories of a life well lived that’s probably the ultimate goal. [Laughs]. Growing up in a very artistic family who (thankfully) sent me to art schools ever since I was very young, pretty much helped me develop a very strong creative persona. I’m not too good with words, I often find myself speechless in certain situations, but if you ask me to draw you something or take a picture of that certain situation or event, I would do that in a heartbeat, happily. I guess creativity is my fuel and my therapy, it keeps me going and I literally can’t live without it. It’s not that I have an “almost” childlike approach to the things around me, I definitely have! Age has always been just a silly number to me. I don’t act or think my age, and it translates in my photos ever so clearly. I’m almost thirty and some mornings I still wake up feeling eighteen. It’s the strangest feeling but I guess I’m just young at heart - I really hope I’ll still feel like this when I’m fifty!
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www.333bracket.com
Since I have quite a big collection of cameras, I’m doing my best not to neglect any of them and I’m trying to use as wide range as possible. Every time I shoot I pick up a different camera which gives me a new outlook on things, while still remaining true to my “style”. My most used and probably favourite will have to be the Hasselblad 501CM - you can’t beat a Hassy Standard, every aspect of this camera is just perfect and I highly enjoy shooting medium format. My second favourite will be the Canon AE1 - she was my first real SLR and holds a special place in my heart, I’ve been through a lot with her and she has always served me well.
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Back to School by Philippe Fragnière
Editorial
Back to School Photographs and text by Philippe Fragnière
www.philippefragniere.ch
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Classrooms have always been a fertile playground for finding new ways of using objects.
A pen could become a dangerous blowgun, a rubber its ammunition - or the perfect counterbalance in a totemic construction. Creating this series of micro-architectures was an opportunity to imagine new arrangements with basic school supplies in a sculptural way.
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Who is it by Bernhard Handick
Editorial
Who is it Photographs and text by Bernhard Handick
www.bernhardhandick. wordpress.com
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In my mixed media work, “sampling” is an extremely important work process. When I talk about my work I use words such as: sound, loudness, structure, harmony or sample - terms which are normally used in a musical context. During my artistic work of the past years, I have collected a large archive of images with an enormous range of different (acoustic) colours. I would label my mixed media work as “Appropriation Art”. From painting to photography, from analogue to digital, I use any kind of technique to produce new work. Every image has its own sound, and the aim of my compositional process is to show the unique characteristics and qualities of the respective work. All the information which I gather from other work that I find will be noticed and decoded by my cultural background. The act of combining and recontextualising plays a major role on my work: “Room for interpretation”. My self-understanding as an artist is not that I produce artwork which is completed after my process of creation. Rather, the spectator is the one who finishes the work in the particular way in which he interprets it - in this sense, he is the one to add the final brushstroke.
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A View on Self Publishing: Lugemik, Estonia by Nicolas Polli Interview with Indrek Sirkel and Anu Vahtra founders of the independent publishing company Lugemik, Tallinn, Estonia. Lugemik is an independent Estonian publishing company founded in 2010. Their books are produced together with artists who are associated with the territory in one way or another and have something interesting to communicate through a printed product. They also opened a bookshop in 2013, with the intent to promote significant publications in a territory where independent publishing is a relatively new phenomenon.
Working within the world of selfpublishing, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interesting for us to get to know other practices with various approaches and different philosophies. Lugemik is becoming established in its field and offers the possibility to photographers and artists to produce quality products with methods and costs which are accessible to both the producers and the consumers. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interesting to get to know practices linked to photography, but from a different point of view: that which enables the distribution of an artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work.
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You aim to publish a variety of different artists, such as photographers and illustrators,... how do you choose the artists whom to work with? Usually, when we’re interested in a project and we think that it could bond with our mentality, we contact the author and we ask them to collaborate with us. Other times, it’s the authors who ask us if we’re interested in their work. We don’t really have a program, just a certain type of work that we want to publish. For example, we worked with Finnish photographer Tuukka Kalia who suggested his work to us. We spoke to Jan Tomson, an Estonian graphic designer, who collaborated to create this book. The collaboration resulted in a certain number of copies – we chose to keep half of them and gave the other half to Tuukka, because we had split the costs. He distributes his half and we distribute ours, also because being a skateboarder, Tuukka has the possibility to approach a different market. We’re more focused within an artistic context. So by dividing the books, we are able to reach a larger number of people. In situations where there’s not a lot of money, we need to make the books such that the costs still allow us to create a good piece. Are your choices when producing a book due to an economical factor, or do you also reflect on what is important for the book itself and its manufacture? It’s always a dialogue between the two things, money and manufacture go hand in hand. Every now and then we need to find a financial compromise, other times we resort to reducing something of the aspect of the book. For example, in the last book we made, Romeo & Julia, we chose to give it a hardcover because the exhibition was about objects, about concrete things – so the cover gives the book the idea of something concrete, of a solid product. But the only way to produce this cover with the small budget we had available was to produce a very small book. The interesting thing is that even if the budget is very low, it’s still possible to produce something. The available budget is a sort of frame and it’s up to you to handle the content in the best way that favours a solution that works. One day, Linda van Deursen, teacher at the Rietveld Academie, said to us: it’s much harder to make a good book design on a low budget, because a higher budget naturally allows you to do anything, but if you have this restriction, this creates the real need to plan something, to find new or different solutions. At the same time, all this can become frustrating because we would like to do certain things, but we can’t do them because of the budget we have. Every so often we end up using our personal money to produce something the way we want it, even just a small amount –a hundred euros can make a big difference.
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Is the number of copies per book dependent on the budget, or on the type of book that you’re producing? When we create a book on our own, with a standard printer or with a risograph, normally we print a limited edition of 200 copies. If we print more than 200 copies it makes more sense to use an offset printer. We prefer not to print any more than 300 or 400 copies as, if the book is a success, it’s easier to reprint. And of course, we always like the idea of printing a book which has sold out. In many places, self-publishing is known only as the phenomenon of complete auto-publication in which one person chooses to bring their project to print, and this normally results in a fanzine. But this is very different from what you’re doing, where do you think that difference lies? I don’t know, I think that nowadays the idea of self-publishing is a little romanticised. For example, Urs Lehni’s books are in a certain sense self-published, yet now they are sold at the MoMA: where is the “self”-publishing element in all this? I think that today the production methods are different and two or three people are able to do work that once required a lot more manpower. The world of fanzines is a more local one, but I don’t think there’s a big difference between us and people who make fanzines. Actually, once we created a fanzine of sorts with Jan Tomson, a folded A3 sheet of paper which we distributed during the prizegiving ceremony for the best graphic designers of the year in Estonia. It was a sort of joke, to question the prize’s logo representing a pair of glasses - which we thought was a bit silly. Is it hard to create a project like Lugemik? What are the biggest difficulties, also bearing in mind your culture? It’s not difficult but naturally when it comes to practical things such as money, some difficulties always present themselves. If you want to publish you have to be rich, or you have to have a second job. We’re not rich. Either you have to be rich, or just plain stupid! We work at the Eesti Kunsti Akadeemia, so we have a monthly salary, and obviously we also have our personal projects as well as the projects with our clients.
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Pictures by Gert Gutmann
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YET magazine is an online triannual photography publication which showcases editorials and photography series by worldwide artists. YET is a magazine about photography. Photography is the main subject and our aim is to feature several different styles of photography, without any restriction in genre, medium, or theme. All the photographers invited by the editorial team are free to develop a personal project and to tell their stories. YET aspires to explore the artists’ work in depth to discover what lies beneath, to find out what it is the photographers want to convey through their series and why. “Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries”. We believe that these processes should be shown because they are the result of the thought process which goes on behind the photographer’s work. Each photograph, regardless of
what medium it has been captured with, represents something very meaningful, buried deep in whoever took it. YET magazine was created to give a visual voice to these stories, in order to share them with an audience. We will showcase both emerging and established photographers. To us, a photographer is someone who can control time and space, who has a vision and is able to express it in the form of an image. What we desire is to tell something about the person behind these creations, starting from the story they tell through their photographs. The photography in YET magazine, by editorial choice, is published free from any graphic or text insertions, without being cropped or cut, and free from any form of further editing. Each series is exhibited exactly how the photographer created it. We base our work on ethical rules which emerge from the firm belief that a photographer’s work must be shown as it is.
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Issue N째 03
ISSN 2296-407X