Copenhagen-based photographer Adam Jeppesen's work challenges the boundaries between documentary and fiction. He is seen as one of the greatest talents in contemporary Danish photography, and we discovered his work during the last Unseen Photo Fair, after which Jeppesen's work by far resonated the most. His photographs inhabit a blurred territory where the real and the fictional become interchangeable. Even if the Danish artist seems to remain faithful to what is in front of his camera, he doesn’t seem to be too concerned about objectivity. The highly impressive work we saw at Unseen was part of the The Flatlands Camp Project. A series of work, recorded on a journey from the Arctic through North and South America to Antarctica. For 487 days Jeppesen travelled in solitude and from this long journey a series of melancholic, evocative landscape pictures have emerged. [ Continue reading ]
On the 31st of March a tremendous collection of photographs by famous English photographer Derek Ridgers will be published by Damiani. Taken in the streets, clubs, basements and bars of London between 1978 and 1987, the photographs in the book named 78–87 London Youth show a broad scala of youth cultures caught through Ridgers' lens. The photographer has documented the perennial youth ritual of dressing up and going out since he first picked up a camera in 1971, and has been drawn to virtually every subculture London has produced. His photographs capture punk’s evolution into goth, the skinhead revival and the New Romantic scene, and the eventual emergence of Acid House and the new psychedelia. Ridgers’ work is both from a anthropological viewpoint, as style-wise of the highest standard. Next to the excellent work of the photographer a foreword by John Maybury is featured in the book, who himself was a mainstay of the times the book documents. [ Continue reading ]
We love this photography series named 'Traffic Lights' by 20-year-old Landau-based photographer Lucas Zimmermann. The series was captured during a foggy night at an intersection close to the historical German city Weimar. Zimmermann created the images taking 5 to 30 second long exposures. Consequently, the colours and lights melted together and a highly surrealistic aesthetic was created. Shot with a fairly reliable camera when it comes to low light, the Canon 5D Mark II, the photographs show, next to his keen eye, also the craft of the young German. When the exposure would become too short, too much noise would occur. At the same time, too long exposure washed out the colors. This balancing act made the project a test of patience, which in the end produced these beautiful images. [ Continue reading ]
We are very thrilled to give another fantastic preview of a feature story by the highly inspiring online platform Jungles in Paris. This story focusses on the environment of the Weddell seals and is an outtake of the beautiful book The Last Ocean by photographer John Weller. Weddell seals live in Antarctica, and unlike other large animals there, like for instance whales, other seals, or penguins, they don't migrate North during the winter. No other mammal on earth lives this far south. They have extraordinary diving abilities, can go as far as 700 meters below the ice in their search for fish, and stay underwater for as long as an hour. [ Continue reading ]
On the 2nd of December a major exhibition of the work of photographer Vivian Maier opened in London-based gallery Beetles and Huxley. The incredible story of Maier started in 2007, when a real estate agent called John Maloof purchased 30.000 negatives taken by the then anonymous Vivian Maier, a reclusive nanny from Chicago. Bought on a hunch, he had inadvertently stumbled upon an undiscovered pot of gold. Born in New York in 1926, Maier spent her youth in France before returning home to The States in 1951, where she spent the next five decades looking after various families and their children. As well as following in the footsteps of Mary Poppins this eccentric, highly intellectual and heavily opinionated lady was also a serious street photographer. [ Continue reading ]
We love the beautiful photography by Copenhagen-based Englishman Alastair Philip Wiper. Over the last six years he has been the house photographer for designer and artist Henrik Vibskov, traveling, building and photographing all the different disciplines Vibskov moves between. Overall Wiper focusses with his photography on the weird and wonderful subjects of industry, science, architecture, and the things that go on behind the scenes. The things that human beings create, seen with an anthropological approach is how Wiper observes the world. A great series from this same sharp angle is his second visit to The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, CERN in Geneva. [ Continue reading ]
We really like the new and improved Protein Journal by the inspiring people of Protein. The subject of the first revamped issue is The City. It features articles including a write-up by design critic and author Stephen Bayley on the true value of urban living, a stunning photo piece from film maker Will Robson-Scott chronicling gang life in Chicago named 'Chi Raq' and The Urban Think-Thank piece by Tag Christof featuring the series of pictures of Torre David by my brother. A chat with Nelly Ben Hayoun, the wildly inventive mind behind NASA’s International Space Orchestra, can be found in it as well as a 30 page Insight section featuring extensive investigations into the nature of modern, urban life around the world. [ Continue reading ]
After going for a month to India, a few weeks in Patagonia, and a few in Nepal, the idea grew in 24-year-old Ruben Brulat's mind to go for a long and unstopped journey, an aesthetic travel, leaving from Gare de Lyon, Paris. Brulat decided to go East. From Europe to Asia by land only, through Iraq, Iran, onto Afghanistan, Tibet until Indonesia, Japan and Mongolia. Inspired by his first trips, Brulat realised that he wanted to see and share the experience of giving yourself away to nature in a photography-project. Early january 2011 the Frenchman asked the first person to pose naked in a landscape for him to photograph, trying to create a symbiosis with the surroundings. Last September Brulat succeeded in finding funds to release a beautiful self published book of this series of photographs taken all over the world which was named Sharing Paths. [ Continue reading ]
We are highly inspired by the online platform of writer Darrell Hartman, writer for among others New York Magazine, Travel + Leisure, Details, and the Wall Street Journal, and his brother Oliver Hartman, called Jungles in Paris. It aims to redefine armchair travel using a global network of professional photographers and filmmakers, it produces and presents short, focused stories on culture, craft, geography, and wildlife around the world. Instead of splendour the Hartman brothers aim to go small and observe with an highly critical eye by focusing on the unexpected surprises uncovered by the careful traveler, from ritual skin-piercing in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley to the beautiful aesthetic of the colourful house fences one finds in Rwanda. [ Continue reading ]
We really like the 5th issue of Modern Matter which was created around the concept of stellar. This is a homonym for its cover star, Stella Tennant on the first place, but is also a word to describe her. 'The interior space of a magazine is defined, by and large, by its writers, its artists and its photographers, while the outer space is often defined by a cover model. Here, Stella Tennant, iconic, playful, a born performer, and above all, independent, embodies the interior and the ethos of Modern Matter magazine, in its first truly unisex issue.' [ Continue reading ]
Some people don't travel, they explore. They explore new ways of crossing the world, they explore new places and new boundaries. Rob Lutter is one of those people. Two years ago, on a windy day in London, Rob Lutter got on his bike and cycled down the road, and he didn't stop. Day after day, for 24 months, he cycled more than 15.000 kilometer all the way to Hong Kong to raise money for charity. As he has reached his initial destination and his hunger for exploration hasn't been stilled, Lutter is now raising funds from Hong Kong for the next stage of his journey. The aim is to cross South East Asia, Indonesia, Australia, the US from west to east, with a final stretch from Scotland to England. [ Continue reading ]
We are delighted that our good friends at Habbekrats have just released their second feature film in the Netherlands after they debuted with road movie Rabat in 2011. Where the collaborative effort of Jim Taihuttu and Victor Ponten had a bright and positive tone, follow up Wolf, written and directed solely by Taihuttu, shows a different side of life. In grainy black and white frames the fierce climate prevailing in life on the streets of a nondescript suburb in the Netherlands is depicted in a style reminiscent of the work of Nicolas Winding Refn and Jacques Audiard. Center point of the narrative is Majid (Marwan Kenzari) who tries to pick up his life after six months in jail by focussing on kickboxing, but as his star rises due to his relentlessness in the ring, he gets sucked into the world of organized crime. [ Continue reading ]
After a hot summer full of travels, seeing beautiful places and meeting amazing people, we are very happy to share this series of images, taken on a glorious day at Lake Como, Italy, by Sydney-based photographer Akila Berjaoui. Her work is very much a reflection of how she feels whenever she takes the photographs. As she states it herself: "it's a visual diary of my ups and downs." When the photographer chooses location, subject matter and model, her personal sentiment always shows one way or the other. [ Continue reading ]
The series Coney Island, shot on the namesake seaside resort, by Montreal and New York City-based Michael Ernest Sweet reminds in many ways of the great black and white street photographers now holding iconic status. After seeing the photographs names like Weegee, Louis Faurer, Garry Winogrand, Bruce Gilden and Mark Cohen come to mind. Not quite coincidental as they are both a major influence on Sweet and photographers who also visited the seaside resort with their cameras. With the great photographers, especially Bruce Gilden, clearly in his mind, but still holding on to a personal vision Sweet started shooting on the beach: "I wanted to be unique in my approach. I didn’t want to be just a copycat". [ Continue reading ]
In 2008, the young photographer Pieter Henket took a picture of upcoming artist Lady Gaga, which eventually became the cover of her multiplatinum album The Fame. Basically from that moment Henket was a household name in contemporary glamour photography. In 2010, confirming this major status, the photograph of Lady Gaga was exhibited as an icon of the 21st century in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Twelve years had passed since Henket arrived in New York City in 1998 as a 19-year old to take up studies at the Film Academy. Instead of his original goal to become a filmmaker, Henket now officially was a major still photographer. [ Continue reading ]
The latest series of Croatia-based photographer Katja Kremenić named 'Rip Currents' is a lovely one. The series documents Kremenić' stay in Costa Rica over the course of January to April of this year. Kremenić beautifully translated the abandoned and romantic scenery of the beaches of Costa Rica, creating the feeling that she and her companion were there only to be greeted by palm trees, tropical butterflies, and playing dogs in the water. The aesthetics of documenting and editing the story follows the concept which was started by Kremenić in her earlier series called Corse Noir shot during a month in Corsica, and recently awarded an honorable prize at the Slovenia Press photo awards. [ Continue reading ]
With the hundredth edition of the Tour just finished it's the perfect time to visit the exhibition of Timm Kölln's The Peloton at the Fotopioniere gallery in Berlin. For The Peloton, Kölln started in 2005 traveling all over Europe attending every major race on the UCI calendar to photograph the entire professional peloton and capture their images just moments after crossing the finish-line. The results are highly impressive and insightful black and white portraits of all the major (and less famous) professional riders of the period, which were published in book-form by Rouleur in October 2010. [ Continue reading ]
We really look forward to the first major European exhibition of work by the American photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia at De Pont in Tilburg starting the 5th of October 2013 in a collaboration with the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. DiCorcia who was born in 1951 in Hartford, Connecticut and can be seen as one of the most influential contemporary photographers. The photographer first came to prominence in the 1970s with photographs that defied definition, existing in the space between documentary fact and movie-style fiction. The meticulous staging of quotidian scenes of family and friends lent the photographs of diCorcia an unparalleled sense of heightened drama and ambiguity. [ Continue reading ]
As we are collectors ourselves we love stories like this particular one about a more then 100 years old Richard Verascope camera. Chris Hughes of A Nerds World came across it at an estate in the Niagara Falls where he purchased the rare camera previously owned by the French Army. The Richard Verascope camera was developed in the late 1800s as one of the first stereoscopic cameras in a reasonably compact form-factor. As it was French-made it is known to be a camera which travelled with the army during World War I to document the battlefield. [ Continue reading ]
Based in the city that, supposedly, never sleeps Narratively wanted to slow down the news cycle instead of following (or rather be sucked in) the dominant maelstrom of stories. The project launched in September 2012 by publisher and editor-in-chief, Noah Rosenberg, and managing editor, Brendan Spiegel, is another of those projects adding more and more significance to crowd funding platform Kickstarter. From February 2013 the platform even saw the possibility to broaden their horizon beyond New York City and started sharing stories from places all over the world, offering the platform to an ever-growing audience. The beginning of this month, less then a year after the launch, the platform was named as part of TIME's 50 Best Websites of 2013. [ Continue reading ]
The project named A Borderless World recently caught our attention. The core of it are Andrea Calandri, Armando Romano, Gabriele Greco and Giulio Menichini and their Land Rover Defender which they drove for 33.000 kilometer in a journey that few have managed to do. It brought them from Italy to the Middle-East, Central Asia, South-East Asia, Eastern-Europe and back to Italy. [ Continue reading ]
In Closed Cities published by Kehrer Verlag, Gregor Sailer examines the forms taken by closed cities in Siberia, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Chile, Algeria/Western Sahara and Argentina. The term 'closed city' was originally coined for the Soviet Union, where, for various reasons, the existence of numerous towns was long kept secret. Some of them were not officially revealed and added to maps until the beginning of this century. [ Continue reading ]
For my fourth Curated gift I present a signed and numbered edition of: An Incomplete Dictionary of Show Birds by photographer Luke Stephenson. London-based design studio YES collaborated with the photographer for this project which documents the fascinating (British) culture of show birds.
What attracts me to the book in the first place is it's explicit quality of exposing the wonderful aesthetic of nature. Stephenson succeeded in creating a series of photographs catching the essence of the depicted birds in color and form like it was done in formal portraits of monarchs during previous centuries. The birds are depicted on mono colored backgrounds resulting in a great contrast with the many visible colors and shapes of the birds, creating an overall aesthetic reminiscent of fashion photography. Stephenson made nature into fashion. [ Continue reading ]
We really like the latest focus point in the visual guidance through the world of creativity by our friends Freunde von Freunden. In Freunde von Freunde Workplaces the intention is capturing the individual, their strengths, their motivations and specifically their work environments in the broadest sense of the word. Rendering intimate impressions that specifically illuminate the creative working environments and lifestyles as shared by the selected friends in the spotlight. By expanding the focus beyond the homes of their friends, Freunde von Freunden Workplaces aims to dig deeper into the lives of those sharing their story. [ Continue reading ]
