MAGAZINE // Creative Photography & Digital Art
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32 | MIGUEL VALLINAS
22 | MICHELE DURAZZI
14 | CARSTEN WITTE
04 | BENJAMIN HARDMAN
MAGAZINE / N° 2 / MAR 2017 Creative Photography & Digital Art
Francesco Pandolfi / Founder & Art director Marta Bonucci / Editor in chief
50 | ERIK JOHANSSON
40 | JUHA ARVID HELMINEN
\\\\ Amaze is a perspective on photography and digital art. A free, online and independent magazine that aims to sensitize to beauty and aesthetics of photography and art as we know it, a virtual space where you can discover emerging and professionals artists and be inspired by them. Our purpose is to share creativity and learn more about the masterminds behind outstanding and impactful images. \\\\
Cover: Queen of the invisible empire by Juha Arvid Helminen info@amaze-project.com press@amaze-project.com www.amaze-project.com
Š Amaze Magazine 2017. All rights reserved. All images and text, published in Amaze Magazine are the sole property of the featured authors and artists and subject copyright. No image or text can be reproduced, edited, copied or distributed in any form without written permission of its legal owner.
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BENJAMIN HARDMAN Benjamin Hardman works to blend digital media with fixed aesthetic principles through textural contrasts and natural obscurities within the landscape. “I tend to see life as if I’m looking through a viewfinder 24/7. I have some sort of strange connection with nature that has led me on a journey to some of the most extreme places on Earth, in pursuit of unique and striking imagery” Benjamin is a 23 year old photographer from Western Australia, now living and working in Reykjavik, Iceland. Since first travelling here in 2013, he was enamoured by it’s stark and haunting landscape. Channeling between portrayals of stark wilderness and refined conceptual pieces, his work encapsulates the seasonal change that grips Iceland throughout the year. One of his project consists of a photographic series of environmental portraits, taken within the heart of the Icelandic landscape. Together, these images portray the pilgrimage of a lone wanderer venturing into a fierce, majestic, and incomprehensible landscape.
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LON
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GEYSIR
BURST OF LIGHT
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CARSTEN WITTE Everything must change. That’s the point of Hamburg-based photographer Carsten Witte’s series Intuition. Intuition displays the skull-painted faces of attractive women. Of the project he says: “One main idea behind my work is the belief that everything is constantly changing but photography can preserve the moment. Beauty is almost nothing without the knowledge of how fast it will fade…”. Carsten Witte is a well-known in the photography world, to such an extent that a US magazine called him the “David Lynch of fashion photography”. A lot of international fashion and lifestyle magazines engaged him and even in the advertisement Witte distinguished himself with the subtle and extremely reduced structures in his images. Carsten Witte’s beauties are naked but never bare. They rather seem to feel secure in the superposing shadows.
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MICHELE DURAZZI “Was ist Metaphysik?” (title borrowed from a philosophical work of Martin Heidegger, 1929) is storytelling through the architectural detail. All pictures are made in 3D without specific real references, and they follow a path in which the link between environment and humans become totally rooted out from what we used to live. Every visual signification not only into what is meant to represent itself but also from the perspective which frames and contains. And by human presence with the role the balancing. The compositional idea is which of any object can be superfluous to represent its totality when a detail can radiate consistency, both geometry and narration. The totality left out to benefit of the observer who is required to rebuild over the edges, like to compensate for an area of partial blindness. The relationship with the human presence determines the scale, vastness and at the same time the heideggerian “dasein”, or being-there: the keystone of existentialist philosophy, for which any ontological significance is related to the subject that expresses, both as presence as language.
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PERENNIAL QUEST
INTERRUPTA SEMITAM
FELIX OASEM
LOREM IPSUM
PLENUM/VACUUM
SEGMENTUM EFFUNDENSQUE
ABSCONDITUS DIVINITAS
ANOMALIA
MIGUEL VALLINAS Human portraits that reveal the animal inside us. This is the main aim of Miguel Vallinas’s project Second Skins, a follow up of a former collection named Skins, for which he photographed himself in the attire of various professions, from matador to mechanic. Two connected photography series that explore the inner reality of a man to unveal the intimate self of a human being. Second Skins represents people with animal faces that have the same purpose. It shows a series of possible personalities that may be within our reach, that may be imposed, or that may be adopted according to circumstances. “Our clothes reveal what is locked within us,” Vallinas suggested in an interview, “Certain people wear certain clothes to differentiate themselves from others. But when they meet people dressed the same way, they form herds. Our clothing is like the fur of animals.” These second skins suggest options, possibilities and ultimately choices.
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JUHA ARVID HELMINEN “In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present.” Francis Bacon Darkness is the word that best describes The Invisible Empire series by finnish photo-artist Juha Arvid Helminen. Figures of authority (in black) whose faces are covered by a veil or a mask stand out from dark backgrounds and landscapes. Helminen dresses his subjects in uniforms which suggest authoritarian movements. The project title Invisible Empire, after all, refers to an alternative name used by the Ku Klux Klan. Helminen: About The Invisible Empire In 2006 I witnessed the so called Smash ASEM “riot”. There I personally saw the dark side of the Finnish police. How young men hide behind their uniforms and hoods and anonymously committed misconduct.
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Later I witnessed the reluctance of the justice system to punish those in uniforms. Uniforms create unity and through them we can separate a soldier from a civilian. But sometimes we hide in them when we do something that is really bad. We wear clothes described by religion, profession, political thoughts and tradition to communicate and represent authority, where we belong and how we see the world. Often this hides our true persona and creates walls between ourselves and between the people that we meet. The characters in my works are the prisoners of these traditions and walls that we’ve created for ourselves. How close can we, the viewers, get to the characters that have so much of their personality taken away from?
ERIK JOHANSSON A way to collect material and realize ideas. Or better, a way to capture ideas. This is what photography means for Erik Johansson, sweden artist and retoucher, that creates impressive surreal images. Although one photo can consist of hundreds of different images he always wants it to look as if it could have been captured. There is no CGI or stock photos in Erik’s personal work, just complex combinations of his own photographs. It’s a long process and he only creates 6-8 new images a year, excluding commissioned work (he worked for clients such as Volvo, Toyota, Google, Adobe, Microsoft and National Geographic). A process that, to simplify, is divided in 3 parts: «It always starts with a sketch, a simple idea. Once I’ve come up with an idea that I think is good enough to realize I need to find the places I need to shoot to put the photo together. This can take anywhere between a few days to several months, sometimes years. This is the most important step as it defines the look and feel of the photo, it’s my raw material. This step also includes problem solving, how to make the perspective, reflections, materials and light etc. realistic», he says.
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THE ARCHITECT / The dicipline of paradoxal geometry, imagine the unimaginable.
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DEVIATION / The action of departing from an established course or accepted standard.
«The second part is shooting/collecting the material. I never use stock photography in my personal projects, I always want to be in complete control of my photos and feel like I’ve done everything myself. It limits me in a way that I can’t realize all ideas I have, but limitations are good sometimes to define the work. The same light and perspective is extremely important to create a realistic result when combining the photos». «The final part is putting the photos together. This takes anything from a few days to several weeks. This is actually the easiest step, if I did a good job in the first and second step. This part is like a puzzle, I have all the pieces, I just need to put them together». Johansson’s pictures looks more like painting: one of them reminds Escher’s most famous work, Relativity, but you can also see identify Dalì’s influence. So it’s no surprise to read on his website that he gets more inspiration from painters rather than photographers.
IMPOSSIBLE ESCAPE
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SOUNDSCAPES / Endless waves
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SET THEM FREE Do the right thing, set them free!
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In the year inflationary cosmology broke
CUMULUS & THUNDER / Cloud Harvest
REVERSE OPPOSITES
DEMAND & SUPPLY
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BENJAMIN HARDMAN www.benjaminhardman.com
CARSTEN WITTE www.carstenwitte.com
MICHELE DURAZZI www.d-arkroom.com
MIGUEL VALLINAS www.miguelvallinas.com
JUHA ARVID HELMINEN www.juhaarvidhelminen.com
ERIK JOHANSSON www.erikjohanssonphoto.com
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