Undead: This image is a part of a series surrounding the theme of ‘chaos’. “For me this image was about running away from troubles and worries, to set yourself loose. People tend to sink in their own life chaos and troubles, and tend to feel numb and dead, so I believe that escaping is good for us sometimesA personal image for me”.
Dor Reznik
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BLACKOUT
One Photo’s Story International contemporary photography - First Fanzine
Warning All images and texts published in BLACKOUT and here are the sole property of the featured photographers. No text and photography can be reproduced, copied, edited without the written permission of its legal property or consent of the publisher.
Š founder - designer and editor: Pauline BRGS.
BLACKOUT Since september 2013, I began to published some photographers, found at random, the culture of the image that gave me my parents and because of various platforms for photographers (Flickr, phmuseum...). I have a great passion for photography since I was a child, since always. With my family (thanks to my father), friends, now I photograph to capture my most important memories. I’m very receptive to memories. I want to capture all the beautiful moments of life, people I love, and also the unknows, to capture the landscapes, the smells, the dreams of life, the sensitive & the beauty of all the seasons. Photography and the discovery It became a healthy addiction and which makes me happy This is the first fanzine created at home with passion. When I began the photo-blog BLACKOUT, I didn’t think that the success would be there. Step by step I received more and more submissions of amazing photographers all around a world. Then, I have created two columns the «What about...?» and the «One photo’s Story», tow know better the actual photographers self-taughts or professionals. Personally I love all the photographers featured in the BLACKOUT website. Well, Enjoy the amazing photographic works produced by a part of the photographers featured in this first Fanzine/webzine.
“A few weeks ago, I was walking my dog in a park at night, it was very dark. No streets lights around. As I’m used to carry one of my cameras everywhere I go, that day I had a small point and shot in my pocket. I thought I could try taking a picture but I really didn’t see anything. I vaguely noticed the white stripes on the ground and felt the dog was around. I said to my dog "Sit down”, looked through the viewfinder without really seeing what I framed, and pushed the shutter. I didn’t expect anything good or special, it was just for fun. As I got back the film developed, I showed the pic to my friends because I found it bad, but not ugly, and needed their point of view. I was surprised they were very enthusiastic about it. It also make me realize that sometimes the photographer doesn’t see the potential of an image. The viewers do. The nice end of the story is that someone I really like the work, sent me a mail to tell me how he loved it and another one to swap a print of this photo for one of his. That made me really happy.“
ISA GELB
“This photo really holds the feelings of that day, the beautiful, hazy, sadness. It was the day my granddad died. My sister, Sydni (in the photo) and I cried and contemplated life all day. We made granddad’s favourite breakfast, played his favourite card game and went for a long walk. This photo was taken at Parc Lafontaine in Montreal, QC where we walked around that day in October, 2013.” ALLIE JACKSON.
“I took this photo on probably one of my lowest points on my life, when I felt anxiety and depression were eating me inside out little by little. Together with that, it was also when I was starting to get deeply obsessed with a guy, and it was the most traumatic and exhaustive thing my obsessive personality has been through. I was feeling the loneliest and the most worthless piece of crap alive. Also, it was my most active time on photography, mainly on self portraits.� GIULIA BIALOGLOWKA
“Once a week,every tuesday, every week, during one year , I was going to my studio. Here, I spent a lot of time in my laboratory, mixing chemicals for the wet plate collodion process. It is a fascinanting technic from the 19th century : by using a tin plate covered by collodion, a large format camera, silver salts, you obtain a tintype. So, every week, I was going here to shoot a selfportrait. This one is the last one, the end of this series. “ MANON WEISER
The Swing at Dusk. “My family and I went for a hike in a forest near our home a few days before 2015, when my brother and I went off on our own to explore. We had been walking through this same forest many times, but this was the first time that we came across a swing, tied to a low branch of a tall tree. It overlooked a castle and estate called Longleat; the Christmas lights still hanging can be seen in the distance. We took turns swinging and pushing each other, I remember the feeling of flying, and that short second of weightlessness when you reach the highest high. We were there for a while, but it didn’t feel like long, even though the sun was almost done setting by the the time we started back to the main trail. I took this photo to help me preserve the memory of the swing at dusk.” MAGNUS JORGENSEN
Stranger in a Strange Land. “I took this photo when my friend Izzy and I went out for a walk in the fields. I remember barely being able to see a metre in front of us, it was like wandering around aimlessly in a cloud. The air was so heavy around me. Both Izzy and I had our cameras in our hands, and I snapped this candid shot of her with her back turned while she was trying to pierce through the mist. When I developed it, the obscured shapes and blurred colours in the distance resembled a surreal, and almost alien landscape. The name of the photo is an allusion to the famous novel by the same name, ‘stranger in a strange land’, where a martian comes to earth, and this photo reminded me of an opposite scenario. Whenever I see this photo, I will remember the seclusion and calming silence I was surrounded by when I captured this moment, on a foggy November morning. ”
This picture was made at the moment, when someone a that time very important for me, suddenly decided just to go away, to disappear from my life. I came home after he said he is going to do so, crying, with the black tights and the white dotted black dress. I took it off. In all this emotional struggle I started to depict it on my photographs. All the feelings I had, are there on this picture, revealed in the naked body and visible curved spinal column. I pressed the shooting button. Sound of the shutter. It was like a therapy. All this emotion escaping through my pictures. Shutter was repeatedly doing its characteristic sound. Here is depicted every single feeling I had at this moment. Sadness, necessity of the security, fragility, naivety and still lasting love.� KATARINA SZABOVA
“This photo is a self-portrait. It was taken in a time when many existential things changed in my life. I had left a phase of life, but I had not yet arrived in the new one. For me the photo symbolizes those feelings of vulnerability and fragility when I was between the two different periods in life. There was a kind of coldness, because I lost something, I felt “naked”, but there was also a positive sense of excitement and the desire for new experiences, emotions and thoughts.” GUNDULA BLUMI
“This was the last selfportrait I could make outdoors, on nature, so it’s very sad an nostalgic to me. That very day I make this picture I was assaulted so I never dared to go out alone to take pictures again. I really miss the calm of the hill and forest, the wind and the sing of the birds in that place.” CELESTE ORTIZ
Drama “I don’t have TV at home. But when I spent few days in Tokyo in 2013, I watched it one hour each night in my hotel room. I was absolutely captivated, despite I understood nothing. And there was this woman, she cries, I didn’t know why, but she is affecting. It seems that she’s living a real drama at the moment. I will never know if it is really a drama. It remains her eyes and her emotion, I will never know what kind of emotion she had. But I have her picture. I think that the drama is here : to have something and don’t know why.” ADRIEN TOMAZ
Undead: This image is a part of a series surrounding the theme of ‘chaos’. “For me this image was about running away from troubles and worries, to set yourself loose. People tend to sink in their own life chaos and troubles, and tend to feel numb and dead, so I believe that escaping is good for us sometimesA personal image for me”. DOR REZNIK
“This photo of a girl outside a cupcake shop, with its imperfections (motion blur from camera movement, soft focus) still represents to me joyousness and energy, and humor. I was driving by, saw the ‘treats, no treats’ sign, and stopped the car to take a picture, because it made me laugh. As I was getting ready to shoot, the girl ran past me, and made the photo.” MICHAEL RADLOFF
I grew up with divorced parents. On Sunday nights, I went from one house to the other. It was always a strange moment of limbo. I tried to capture that feeling in this photograph. SOPHIE BARBASCH
Interview with AMY FICHTER
Amy, who are you? I was born and raised on a farm in rural Iowa. My childhood home was located on the corner of a gravel road and a dirt road. I had the quintessential small-town experience growing up, and—thanks to a wonderful art teacher—went on to study art at the undergraduate and graduate levels. I am now a professor in the School of Art & Design at the University of Wisconsin–Stout, a mid-size university in a small town near Minneapolis/St. Paul. The school has about 1,100 art and design students majoring in graphic design, interior design, industrial design, entertainment design, game design, and studio art. I teach Life Drawing to students in all the majors, helping them learn the anatomy and structure of
the human body so they can accurately draw the figure from memory and observation. I was trained in traditional figure drawing and have exhibited drawings throughout the United States—having works in the permanent collections of the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, SC; the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, AL; and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC. Over the past five years, I have turned my artistic production from drawing to photography and have shown my photographic work in over 60 exhibitions throughout the US and abroad. I am married and have one son ( and four cats! ).
What is your approach in photography? I think of photography and drawing in the same way. They are both methods for paying attention, of slowing down and recording the world to understand it better. I am old-fashioned in the sense that I do still care very much about making beautiful images, and I have years behind me of thinking about composition and space. My formal education in drawing certainly comes through in my photographs. I have never been interested in the typically beautiful, but I am interested in searching out and paying attention to the
more quiet, hidden, “underdog” subjects that go unnoticed by most people. For something to be truly beautiful to me, it needs an element of melancholy, some hint that this thing I’m photographing is beautiful at least partly because it is so fleeting. When began you to take photos? During my first year of high school, my art teacher introduced us to black and white film and taught us how to use the darkroom. I remember loading film onto the developing reel in complete darkness and feeling as if I had just been let in on one of the magical secrets of the universe. My parents gave me a Pentax K-1000 for my birthday, and I never looked back. When have you begin your personal photographic and artistic research? For several years, I used photography mostly for reference material for drawings. I was shooting other images, but didn’t consider them professional or important work. Around 2009, though, I started shifting my thinking about all the photos I had been shooting. I began to realize how much I enjoyed taking my creative work outside of the studio, using photography to explore more of the place I call home, and letting the photos themselves be my artwork. What’s influence your work? My thinking as an artist and photographer has always been influenced by my reading. The ideas in Scott Russell Sander’s essay, “Homeplace,” are almost always in my mind when I am out shooting. In that essay, Sanders’ argues for the importance of “staying put, learning the ground, going deeper.” He writes about the value of inhabiting—really knowing—the place in which we live. Annie Dillard’s essay, “Seeing,” is pinned up to my office wall, with underlines throughout. “The lover can see,” she writes, “and the knowledgeable.” Those words have guided my drawing and photographing for years. I take photos to
learn about a place, a culture, so I can see it more clearly. Some photographers whose work I admire include William Christenberry, Sally Mann, William Greiner, Emmet Gowin, and William Eggleston. The death is very present in your work, can you say more about it? The tendency in American culture is to ignore death, to be fearful of it. I am not interested in ignoring it or tucking it away. Through acknowledging death in my photography, I teach myself to accept my own mortality and that of my loved ones. My mother taught me many things, but one of the most important was how to be gracious in one’s own death, grateful of the time and love you are given. She taught me how to be fiercely attached to my life and also to be willing to let it go. What is the place of the religion in your work? I was raised in a moderate Protestant church in small-town Iowa, where going to Sunday School was just what people did. People went to church, held their beliefs tightly to themselves, and there was not much outward carry-over of religion beyond that. For a time in my late teenage years I became pulled into evangelical Christianity. I was attracted to the fervency and commitment of believers and the way they seemed to live their religion. It didn’t take long for me to realize my values didn’t jive with theirs. My intellectual curiosity, my passion for beauty and imagery, my openness—I could not align my core values with religion for very long. I am still very much fascinated by Christianity and its hold on the majority of Americans. When I photograph religious symbols I am doing so from my experience of being once an insider and now looking on from a more critical place. This project it left a need to denounce the American rural
world? One on hand, rural America is home. It is where I come from. I am most happy in quiet, uncrowded spaces. Often, when we are in a city for more than a day or two, I’ll say to my husband, “Take me to the country.”
However, I’m also a bit of an outsider in the country. I’m an artist for one, and politically liberal for two. I’ve lived in cities, gone to graduate school, and come back to a small town, so I see these places with two sets of eyes. What pleases you most in this choice of artistic expression which is the photography. I find pleasure in creating beautiful images, in discovering little known places, in finding the best way to frame a scene
to tell its story. I enjoy the way photography invites me to pause and investigate. I’m fascinated by lenses, how each one gives a different view of the world. And I love film. As someone who still makes art by putting pencil to paper, I will always appreciate the interaction between eyes, hands, and physical materials. Have you a new photographic project? My “new” camera is a Canon AE-1. I haven’t shot with an SLR for about ten years, and when I took it out for its first few rolls, I felt like I was back home as a photographer. My most immediate plans are to simply get out with that camera as much as possible this summer. Longer term, I have a sabbatical leave coming up starting in January 2015, when I’ll be studying and preparing to teach Animal Drawing. I’m sure there will be a new body of photographic work that will accompany that project.
“I’m interested in some details that may seem of little concern for most people. It’s like a game : shall people be able to see or not ? For example, in this picture, there is a small boat reflection in the window…” Jean-François FLAMEY aka Nim Is a Tree
This is me and my boy, Manuel. We met at the age of 15 thanks to some common friends. We went out for a few weeks and then we lost each other and we haven’t seen for 6 years. Last spring we casually met again on the street and we took an Ice cream and talked about what happened in our lives during those last years. We both were grown and changed so we started to date again and it’s working. He is very sweet, naif and enthusiastic. We go through a lot of adventures together. I even love the fact he doesn’t know nothing about photography. I feel a normal girl with him; he makes me see the pure side of my work. GIULIA BERSANI
«Photo taken in Burkina Faso, in the village of Barani, in the northwest of the country, where mixes ethnic groups Fulani and Rimaïbé (the former slave of the Fulanis), the slave was abolishes in Burkina Faso in 1984 under Sankara. The village is knew for its equestrian festival the fechiba, the Fulanis being people of breeders, recognized for their capacity by the training. This photo was taken the day of Tabaski (feast of Eid Al-Adha " literally the big party", in sub-Saharan Africa). The girls take out their most beautiful loincloths and their most beautiful fineries, before passing in every house of the village to collect some CFA francs, to organize a small party between them. This party in the Muslim religion is the most important and is synonymic of division and mutual aid. THOMAS FOURNIER
"It was the first time I'd been out of my home country for 10 years. In those 10 years I felt like I'd changed into so many different people at different times of my life. But as of the past few years I had become very reclusive and anxious, and seemed to be afraid of anything new or changing. I couldn't visit anywhere new for fear of having panic attacks instead of sleep. But a lot changed in my personal life and I somehow bit by bit allowed myself to be free of a lot of my anxieties, and for the first time in 10 years travelled to Spain with my Mum for a short break as a celebration of me graduating university. It was a huge step for me and very inspiring, I remember sitting in the warm sun and breeze and feeling the most relaxed I'd felt for a very long time, just quietly excited for new things and possibilities." LEANNE SURFLEET
“Even though people are crossing your own path, those who will never reappear. you have banned them on to a photographic surface, as if this could keep them near� TABEA BORCHARDT
“My sister had gone to my house to visit me, so we was in my bedroom playing with Sakura (my kitten) and I took the camera, put it in a table and jump to make something to pose like her. Then the camera lost stability and the picture was disgusting. But when I saw it on the computer, there was something I liked. And that’s the picture you see here, just a little detail of a bad photo.” APRIL PERETTI
It was a road trip through Costa da Morte “It was road trip through da Morte (Coast ofathe Death), a really Costa wild and hostile(Coast of the Death), a really andReally hostile place,huge specially in winplace, specially inwild winter. windy, ter. Really hugerain. waves and heavy rain. waveswindy, and heavy There are many legends about the place and too many There are many legends about the place and deaths. a very It impressive and overwhelming place. too many Itdeaths. a very impressive and You seem lost and You too small time. overwhelming place. seem all lostthe and too And I think this all picture captures that this feeling of capbeing nowhere, small the time. And I think picture about to fade dissapear in to the sea…” tures that feeling of away beingand nowhere, about fade away and dissapear in the sea... Alberto Alvarez Gomez ALBERTO ALVAREZ GOMEZ
“I was driving back from Canberra where I had just met up with Jamie and Wouter for the first time and had decided to drive a scenic route home as I had heaps of time to kill. I was silly and picked a dirt road to go through the great dividing range and found myself in the middle of nowhere with darkness setting in on a track carved out by 4x4’s. After a few hours of slogging it out, the road opened up into this beautiful little gem of a town and I pulled over and took this shot. It’s one of my favourites.” WILLIAM BROADHURST
Interview with ELEONORA STRANO A TURKMEN STORY
Eleonora, who are you ? I am a photographer, I have passed more the half of my life at to take the pictures in argentic, that gives an idea onto my age already, not?! What was your course? As I said it, I have the impression of credit note always made photography. There is indeed some attempts in the drawing, the painting, but not, i need to create quickly, and to do things instinctivly. It is thus the photography. What motivated you to work as independent photographer? I do not think it is a question of motivation. Seriously, I think that I know how to make nothing of other one. We would not have wanted of me in other disciplines. what way did you learn this art? Completely self-taught. Even if I passed to make a tour in Paris 8 and even if I studied 7 months at the EMI CFD in Paris. It is simple, while experimenting I learnt. It is what I like in the photo, highly-rated experimental. And I find it, especially in the argentic photography. I often rented cameras. When I lived in Thailand, there was in my street a Chinese seller who had a kind of Ali baba’s cave, at the beginning I rented, but very fast he let me borrow what I wanted free of charge. I took advantage of it. I dream to find the same in France ! Consider you above all as photographer or as “reporter� of images? I do not really believe in the term reporter of images. It is rather reducing in my opinion because, for me, no photographer is ever only a reporter of images. That goes farther. On the same ground, with the same subject, the same angle, no photographer returns the same things. Whether he likes it or not, that that is conscious or not, it puts in it
cover a place or a history and I experiment it through the photography. As for me the photography is really an experience, a meeting, It is very close to my personality and to my life. In what surrounds me, and what is close me. But it is also a wonderful excuse to approach unknown grounds. A kind of healthy curiosity. What way do you prepare your subjects, before the ground? By experimenting. I need it. It is what gives the impression to me of knowing my subject. How decid you of the size of the report before, or after the fieldwork? Given that I am allowed carry by my feelings, my sensations a lot and given that I intellectualize not at all the photography I would say that it comes always later. I really photograph in the instinct. Danger is inherent to this job? Of course. That depends on the subject. Certain photographers take enormous risks. But they are, fortunately, most of the time, mastered risks. And then, there is always a part of chance. It is this last aspect which slows down me. And which makes that I do not take risks. The only risks which I incurred, recently, were that we transfer me of the country. My life was not at stake. I am rather of the kind coward. Or I have a good instinct of survival. Did internet change your way of working? In particular for the promotion of your work. What does It miss so that this platform of distribution becomes a tool essential to the reporters? Internet, yes it’s a chance of a lifetime for all. It is very well. That allows to see it more. To make it more. We get lost there a little. But globally I find that although there are more and more photographers. The quality is there only better. What is difficult it is that it does not necessarily mean that that allows them to live on it. For the art and for the information it is more undeniable one but not always for the purse. Often moreover the success is inversely pro-
the crowdfounding is intelligent. He allows the public to get involved to make live the subjects and the images that they really want that we tell them. It is a breath of fresh air. What was for you the thing the most difficult to cover? I can’t really say that I cover events. I do not make news. I am rather in the documentary. What interests me it is the commonplace, the everyday life, not the event. I leave it to others who know very well how to make it. I need to take time and to be free. I believe that my photography is conditioned by my origins, my social background. It is very connoted girl-with-european-middle class‌ Certain photographers integrate these factors, others try to get loose from it. I assume it. The questions which affect me or inrice! terest me are always close mysosensibility, to my real-life Theretoare experience or to my character. There is always this link many Americans: which makes that I recognize myself Francesca Woo- there the other one a lot.There is a part of my ownWilliam personal story in every image. dman, Eggleston, Jeff what subject would you likePhilippe to cover, and which has little Wall, chance to interest a diffuser? Haha. All that I like has little chance to interest a diffuser. But that is not grave. I know many photographers who passed in quoted by magnificent stories because we had told them that that was not a seller! I think that we communicate well on a subject with which we feel in phase. No matter that It is fashionable or not. The part of one whom we put it is often the link, the activator between the others and the story which we want to tell. As in the cinema, a story little to be singular, unique, improbable, but it is the sensibility which is universal and which all at once makes that everybody plunges. who are the reporters photographers and photographers, whose work you appreciate, which are the reasons? Haaaaa‌ impossible to answer that. There are many women, I believe: Agnes Dherbeys, Viviane Dalles, Anastasia
the kinds, the subjects that I always liked a lot. There are moments beautiful and subtle as when he photographed every meal which he prepared to his wife dying up to the last, is all the same rather strong to make cry with photos of glutinous rice! There are so many Americans: Francesca Woodman, William Eggleston, Jeff Wall, Philippe Lorca Di Corcia, Justin Maxon, Alec Soth …And, Alessandro Imbriaco, Alexander Gronsky, Mathias Depardon, Adrien Matton, Jérémie Jung, Davide Monteleone… the list is too long! Well, to summarize, I like the photography generally but, in particular, when it has an original bottom emphasized by an uncluttered, soberly beautiful shape.
Nota-bene: Eleonora photographs through her journeys, through her meetings and from her relation to the others. She makes us share her look on the world, thanks to the humanist photographic practice and reveals a real talent journalistic as reveals it her entitled series «A Turkmen Story» realized as its name evokes in Turkmenistan, country of an incredible beauty, a dictatorship and former soviet republic. P.brgs.
«The suburbs of the European cities seem quite equal: impersonal, uniform, monotonous. They are place of passage from a reality to an other, an emptied by a dimension full to a whom seem. Real ‘Steps-places’ which we all we cross generally without ever stopping really observing the small private individuals or the forms which characterize them. Nevertheless also in the margins of the urban large cities it is possible to pick presences one way or another respect being discordant in the general context. Presences which they make a ‘human’ dimension to the place in which they are. The photo of this caravan was jumped up in the immediate suburb of a city of the North Italy. An object that it has the strength to give to the bare surrounding landscape. The photo of this caravan was taken in the immediate suburb of a city of the North of Italy. This caravan gives some strength to the surrounding landscape deprived a kind of vitality and of ‘resistance’ against the time which passes.» LUCA PRESTIA
“Most trips are pretty mellow, but on a my first trip to Yosemite as an adult with my buddies Travis and Cody. We get there first stop of the trip at Bridal Vail Falls we hike up the trail to shoot some photos, I end up taking longer then the do, so I start walking down the trail back to the car, when I see Travis telling Cody to sit down by this pile of rocks. Cody is all bloodied up because he fell off a 12 bolder onto his back, head and cameras. That was probably the scariest things to happen on one of my trips, but that guy is a trooper, he out hiked me on that trip, even after a that fall.� WILLIAM MARK SOMMER
“This photo is my "chosen” one. I mean I can explain the story behind every photo I have ever taken and what it means to me. But this one I love, for many reasons. One of them being how when I travel around in cars I always think and wonder about all those lives unfolding In their metal boxes on four wheels. How you will most likely never physically have your life intersct with yours, For a brief moment on the road you get to see glimpses into all these lives. Like a portable home in a sense. The questions that forms in my head is Where are they going and where are they coming from? Are they happy? And so on.“ MAREN MORSTAD
Special thanks to (in order of appartition) SOFDIA BUCCI (cover & back-cover) ISA GELB ALLIE JACKSON GIULIA BIALOGLOWKA MARION WEISER MAGNUS JORGENSEN KATARINA SZOBOVA GUNDULA BLUMI CELESTE ORTIZ ADRIEN TOMAZ DOR REZNIK MICHAEL RADLOFF SOPHIE BARBASCH AMY FICHTER GIULIA BERSANI THOMAS FOURNIER LEANNE SURFLEET TABEA BORCHARDT APRIL PERETTI ALBERTO ALVARO GOMEZ WILLIAM BROADHURST ELEONORA STRANO LUCA PRESTIA WILLIAM MARK SOMMER MAREN MORSTAD .... & all the others photographers published on the website & in the next book, I promise. With all my respect. P.