Ladies only
Ladies only
Contemporary Women Photographers with portraits of people and landscapes curated by Tina Schelhorn
Aline Smithson, Los Angeles Anais López, Amsterdam, Netherlands Beatrix Reinhardt, NY, USA Betsy Schneider, Phoenix, USA Dona Schwartz, Minneapolis, USA Elaine Ling, Toronto, Canada Helen K. Garber, Santa Monica, USA Helén Petersen, Stord, Norway Ilse Bing, NYC, USA Isabelle Pateer, Antwerp, Belgium Jessica Hines, Savannah, USA Joanna Black, Edinburgh, UK Karen Glaser, Florida, USA Katharina Hesse, Beijing, China Laura Hynd, London, UK Linda Troeller, NYC, USA Mariette Pathy Allen, NYC, USA Marion Belanger, Guilford, USA Martine Fougeron, NY, USA Mary Ann Lynch, NY, USA Melissa Moore, London, UK Midori Mitamura, Tokyo, Japan Rania Matar, Boston, USA Rebecca Norris Webb, Brooklyn, USA Régina Monfort, Brooklyn, USA Sanne de Wilde, Amsterdam, Netherlands Scarlett Coten, Paris, France Susan Barnett, NYC, USA Susan Lipper, NYC, USA Viktoria Sorochinski, Berlin, Germany Walde Huth, Cologne, Germany Wendy Sacks, Rochester, USA
Arrangement in Green and Black, Portraits of the Photographer‘s Mother Only in Burundi Chapter IV Kumbha Mela Sweet is the Swamp Empty Nesters Baobab: Tree of Generations Santa Monica Pier Windchimes Self Portraits and Paris in the 30th Unsettled My Brother‘s War Family Portrait / Jubilee Springs and Swamps Human Negotiations Lady Into Hut Chelsea Hotel New Jersey - Philadelphia 1968 Rift/ Fault Teen Tribe Forever Marilyn Lands Ends Tokyo Shock / Ikeda Midori A Girl and Her Room My Dakota No Crybabies Dwarf Empire Mectoub Not in Your Face Not Yet Titled Silent Dialogs Paris Haute Couture 1955 Immersed in Living Water
Arrangement in Green and Black: Portrait of the Photographer‘s Mother Series “This series had serendipitous beg. I found a small print of Whistler‘s painting ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter‘s Mother‘ at a neighborhood garage sale. The same weekend, I found a leopard coat and hat, a 1950‘s cat painting, and what looked like the exact chair from Whistler‘s painting. That started me thinking about the idea of portraiture, the strong compositional relationships Aline Smithson going on within Whistler‘s painting, Los Angeles, USA and the evocative nature of unassuming details. My patient 85 year-old mother posed in over 20 ensembles, but unfortunately passed away before seeing the finished series. I am grateful for her sense of humor and the time this series allowed us to be together.” After a career as a New York Fashion Editor and working with the greats of fashion photography, Aline Smithson discovered the Rolleiflex and never looked back. Now Aline continues to create her award-winning photography with humor, compassion, and a 50-year-old camera. Aline founded and writes the blogzine, Lenscratch, that celebrates a different contemporary photographer each day. www.alinesmithson.com
Only in Burundi Anais Lopez is a visual artist based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She is a documentary photographer who works with still and moving images. The choice for still and/or moving images is decided exclusively by the story that she wants to tell. Anais Lopez graduated from the Royal Art Academy in The Hague in 2006 and did a two year Masters (2008-2010) at Sint Joost Academy in Breda about narrative structuAnais López res and documentary strategies. Amsterdam, Netherlands Besides working for magazines as an independent photographer, she makes photo documentaries about things that matters to her. ‘Only in Burundi‘ is a foremost a book but also an installation. “The past two years my colleague Eva Smallegange (writer) and I worked on this book. We travelled to Burundi (Central Africa) and got to know this country, its inhabitants and its culture. Through photography and writing we show contemporary Burundian life in different strata of society. Tying all these colourful stories and images together was a long process, but the results are amazing. We succeeded in making a book with a positive outlook, containing personal stories of our guide and main narrator Koky. He tells about his childhood and introduces ten of his friends from different strata of society such as: the manioc miller from whom he buys his flour, the princess who was once engaged to his brother, the president and his cousin the cow herder. They share their view on what you need to survive in this intriguing country, five years after the ending of the civil war that raged for years: to get things done you need the right connections.” www.anaislopez.nl
Ertüchtigung - Chapter IV: Kumbha Mela 2013 The translation of the German word ‘Ertüchtigung’ is ‘strengthening’. The ‘modes of strengthening’ that emerged over the centuries are based on belief or science, culture, crisis or development of thought…the list is endless. Chapter four “Kumbha Mela 2013” investigates bathers going to and coming from their holly dip during Beatrix Reinhardt the early morning hours. New York, USA The Kumbha Mela, during which Hindus gather to bathe in a sacred river, has been described as the greatest pilgrimage in the world. It is celebrated in a 12-year cycle by rotating at four sacred places on the banks of rivers in India. The Kumbha (pitcher) is a symbol of fertility and expresses several values, mostly related to the generative and purifying power of water. Hindus believe that submerging themselves in the sacred waters on the most auspicious day of the new moon will absolve them and their ancestors of sin, thus ending the cycle of rebirth. www.beatrixreinhardt.com
Sweet is the Swamp “I make photos. I make videos. I make dinner for my kids. I can‘t sit still. I am told I complain too much but it is really hot in Arizona. I like to juggle the soccer ball on the sidelines of my kids‘ games. I like to rave to my students about my newest TV obsessions. I like to read my students Facebook status updates to see what absurdly hyperbolic statement I have made in class. Hyperbole aside, I believe deeply in the importance of art in making our lives rich and complex and for keeping us in touch Betsy Schneider with our humanity. ” Phoenix, AZ, USA Betsy Schneider studied at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was assistant to Sally Mann and spent four years living and working in London, England, where she taught photography and English. In 2002 she joined the School of Art faculty at Arizona State University as Professor. She lives in Tempe, Arizona. www.betsyschneider.com
Empty Nesters Dona Schwartz is an American photographer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She earned her PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication and is professionally engaged with photography as an artist, scholar, and educator. “I can think of few experiences that changed my life as profoundly as my first child‘s birth. With my newborn‘s arrival, my identity, social status, and self-concept forever Dona Schwartz changed. During the months Minneapolis, USA leading up to his birth, I busily readied my nest. In that process, my ideals, my hopes, and my naïve assumptions were invested in and revealed by the material objects I assembled for him: the used crib I lovingly refinished, the bedding I sewed, the toys I bought, and the books I shelved. Through portraits situated in the spaces prepared for children, On the Nest explores this transitional moment and seeks to discover the range of approaches expectant parents bring to the act of nurturing a new generation. I am equally interested in the transition to life without children as I draw closer to presiding over an empty nest. I am curious about how parents experience this new life stage. Is the empty nest greeted with relief ? Sadness? Joy? Anxiety? What becomes of the spaces once occupied by children? Are their rooms preserved as a shrine or reclaimed for new uses? Do totems of their childhood remain or has their presence vanished without leaving a trace? These spaces, too, offer clues about life experience, our sense of the past, and expectations for the future. Through this portrait series I am exploring moments of profound change, and in doing so, I hope to offer a nuanced depiction of what it means to create a new life” www.donaschwartz.com
Baobab - Tree of Generations “In some of the most arid and infertile regions of Africa, Madagascar, and Australia the Baobab tree grows to enormous size. These miraculous giants are one of the largest living things on the planet and have a potential lifespan of more than a thousand years. They are great friends to their human neighbours – providing an ever-renewing source of textiles, netting, baskets and roofing. Their nutritious fruit has many medicinal properties. My photographs are reflections on Elaine Ling the ancient, lifesustaining dialogue Toronto, Canada between these enduring megatrees and the people – grandmothers and fathers, parents, youths and small children – who live among them. These portraits, pairing individual Baobabs with their human neighbours, document a most intimate relationship. They were taken in South Africa, Mali and Madagascar.” Elaine Ling is an exuberant adventurer, traveler, and photographer who is most at home backpacking her view camera across the great deserts of the world and sleeping under the stars. Born in Hong Kong, Elaine Ling has lived in Canada since the age of nine. Upon arrival in Canada, Elaine was exhilarated by the freedom of space and began her attraction to Stone and places of Nature. She studied the piano, the cello and medicine. When not photographing, Dr. Ling practices family medicine in Toronto and plays cello in Orchestra Toronto, a community orchestra. In 2009 Elaine Ling produced her first book: Mongolia, Land of the Deer Stone, published by Lodima Press. www.elaineling.com
A Night View of Los Angeles Santa Monica Pier Helen K. Garber is known for her night urban landscapes taken in cities such as Los Angeles, New York, Paris and Venice. ‘A Night View of Los Angeles’ was commissioned for the 2006 International Biennale of Architecture in Venice, Italy. It is a 40-foot long, 360-degree panorama of the entire city of Los Angeles that was printed on one continuous piece of Helen K. Garber silk fabric. Santa Monica, USA Helen directed a 2-year long project entitled ‘An Intimate View± where artists of different cultures and economic backgrounds documented their own neighborhood. She also directed the NoirFest Santa Monica, a citywide, interactive cultural festival with a night photography shoot at Helen K. Garber‘s favorite location, the Santa Monica Pier. Helen K. Garber continues to teach workshops for Otis College of Art & Design and for Photo LA. www.helenkgarber.com
Windchimes “In my black and white works, I mainly work intuitively and instinctively, and images are often triggered by objects, memories and experiences, – real or imagined. In my works I try to explore relations in life through dreamlike re–visitations of a childhood‘s play-scapes, escaping into other worlds. Known – and yet unknown. All my black and white prints are silver gelatin, printed by myself. Since 2000 I have been working as Helén Peterson Department Manager at Halsnøy Stord, Norway Kloster, Sunnhordland Museum, being responsible for various events and curating exhibitions within various fields of art. I discovered photography in 2003, and attended several courses. This led to commissioned work for the Marine Research Institute, Norway, as a fieldworker/ photographer. In 2010 I started working film-based and experienced the joys of the darkroom. For as long as I can remember, images have been playing on my mind, like dreams. Whether through drawing, painting or sculpting, I was always trying to capture these elusive images. Now, I try to do so through the lens of a camera.” www.helenpetersenfotografi.wordpress.com
Self Portraits and Paris in 30th Ilse Bing (1899 – 1998) was a German avant-garde and commercial photographer who produced pioneering monochrome images during the inter-war era. Her move from Frankfurt to the burgeoning avant-garde and surrealist scene in Paris in 1930 marked the start of the most notable period of her career. She produced images in the fields of photojournalism, architectural photography, advertising and Ilse Bing fashion, and her work was published New York, USA in magazines such as Le Monde Illustre, Harper‘s Bazaar, and Vogue. Respected for her use of daring perspectives, unconventional cropping, use of natural light, and geometries, she also discovered a type of solarisation for negatives independently of a similar process developed by the artist Man Ray. In 1936, her work was included in the first modern photography exhibition held at the Louvre, and in 1937 she travelled to New York where her images were included in the landmark exhibition “Photography 1839–1937” at the Museum of Modern Art. She remained in Paris for ten years, but in the shadow of World War II, she and her husband immigrated to New York City in 1941. There, she had to re-establish her reputation, and got steady work in portraiture. By 1947, Bing came to the realization that New York had revitalized her art. Her style was very different; the softness that characterized her work in the 1930s gave way to hard forms and clear lines, with a sense of harshness and isolation. This was indicative of how Bing‘s life and worldview had been changed by her move to New York and the war-related events of the 1940s. In the last few decades of her life, she wrote poetry, made drawings and collages, and occasionally incorporated bits of photos. She was interested in combining mathematics, words, and images. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilse_Bing
Unsettled Master in Visual Arts, Photography (achieved with merith), St Lukas Brussels (BE, 2003), Works and lives in The Netherlands and Belgium. Since 2007 I am focussing increasingly on long- term personal projects operating in a cross-over area between documentary and autonomous photography. I expresses myself in series which base their subject matter on topics close to myself, but which have a wider meaning by addressing a more universal Isabelle Pateer tendency in which I motivate the Antwerp, Belgium viewer to search for a personal relation and interpretation. In doing so I am aiming for a subtle form of universal social criticism. The project ‘Unsettled‘ focuses in a metaphoric way on the worldwide phenomenon of industrial expansions and its consequences, shown in the study of the Belgian village Doel and the surrounding polder area. The place is threatened by vast expansions of the port of Antwerp and related nature compensation plans, which installs an artificial contrast between nature and culture. www.isabellepateer.com
My Brother‘s War “In 1967 my brother, Gary, was drafted into the US Army during the American war in Vietnam. Because our parents were ill and Gary was our caretaker, I was sent to live with relatives. Gary wrote many letters home while he was stationed in Vietnam. Pictures arrived. Although in his letters he spoke of his living quarters and described the helicopters he flew into the front lines, he rarely discussed the dangers. Discharged from the army in December of 1969 with a “service connected nervous disorder”, we Jessica Hines later came to know his problem as Post Savannah, USA Traumatic Stress Disorder. My pre-war brother, a normal and well-adjusted person became, according to the US Veterans‘ Administration, 50% disabled. He took his own life ten years later. Twenty-five years after his death, I discovered among his belongings, a memo pad that revealed the names and addresses of his wartime friends, some of whom I managed to contact – 35 years after the war. Through the remembrances of his wartime friends and through my own journeys to Vietnam in 2007 and 2008, I retraced Gary‘s “footsteps” using his letters and photographs as guides. More recently, while perusing Gary‘s Vietnamese/English dictionary, I found hand-written declarations of love from a Vietnamese woman. The two had fallen in love and I have since confirmed their plans to marry. After his discharge, Gary returned to Viet Nam to live and work as a civilian. He never told any of us his love. The process of making this work is healing for me.” Things are not as they seem. Nor are they otherwise. ~ The Lankavatara Sutra Artist and storyteller Jessica Hines, uses the camera‘s inherent quality as a recording device to explore illusion and to suggest truths that underlie the visible world. At the core of Hines‘ work lies an inquisitive nature inspired by personal memory, experience and the unconscious mind. Hines won The Kolga Award for Best Experimental Photography, Kolga Tbilisi Photo in 2012. She lives in Statesboro, Georgia, USA www.jessicahines.com
Jubilee “Visiting a friend I found myself at the Diamond Jubilee party for a care home for residents that have physical and mental problems. The staff thought bringing my dogs would really add some joy. Watching this celebration took me back to my childhood. Visiting my Brother, I remember the crushing fear, I understood only that he was different and he lived in what looked like an old hospital. I was not allowed to ask questions. I don‘t remember seeing any joy, although he rocked and purred like my Joanna Black guinea pig when my mother hand fed Edinburgh, UK him pieces of cafeteria meat pies. As an eight year old, this horrified me. I now know that it was so traumatic for my Mum that whilst she could show him love, she did not have the strength to talk to me about it. It hurt. Through the dogs I met the other patients. I met Billy and his niece Crystal. Crystal asked me if I knew of anyone like Billy. I said I had had a brother but that he died years ago. She asked what had happened, unblinkingly waiting for an answer. I tried to answer as best I could, but it was hard. I had never been asked these questions before. It felt like she was my eight year old self and I was my mother. It was overwhelming. She saw my camera and said “take our picture” which I did, then turned around so they wouldn‘t see my tears. From an early age, I was always interested in photography. The death of my Mother which happened months after the birth of my son, her only grandchild had a galvanic effect on me. It made me question who I was and how I came to be that way. I started to take photographs again in 2010 that I realised this was a way for me to capture my thoughts and emotions and express them. My work allows me to reflect on a psychological and emotional level many different subject, some which are more passing flights of curiosity and some which are more personally deep rooted. This is what I believe is the foundations of my photography.” www.joannablackphotography.com
Springs and Swamps “These photographs were made in a geographical location that is both seductive and sickening. This place is Florida, home to some of the most unique and breathtaking ecosystems in the world. I want to show what you haven‘t seen. The pictures are from two bodies of work, Springs and Swamps. The first series was shot in the pristine freshwater rivers and springs of north and central Florida. This Karen Glaser exploration inspired a trek to the Florida. USA southern part of the state where the most magnificent primordial swamps are located in Big Cypress National Preserve and its neighbor, Everglades National Park. The exquisite natural light that graces the springs and swamps is used solely to illuminate my pictures. These places are powerful and visceral and to show the essence of these remarkable areas, the photographs are as layered and rich as are the environments. The mystery of these waters and the complicated puzzle of their continued existence inspires these pictures and continues to summon us to look even deeper.” www.karenglaserphotography.com
Human Negotiations Katharina Hesse is a Beijing-based photographer who has worked throughout Asia for two decades. Her work primarily focuses on China‘s social concerns among them youth and urban culture, religion and North Korean refugees. She has traveled on assignment to Indonesia, Mongolia, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Korea and the Philippines. Human Negotiations is an independent, self-funded collaboration between documentary photographer Katharina Hesse Katharina Hesse and writer Lara Beijing, China Day, exploring the lives of a community of Bangkok sex workers through both images and text. The project came into being in 2007, when Hesse and Day met during a photography workshop. Over the course of three years, the pair have returned to Bangkok‘s red-light districts repeatedly to interview and photograph more than two dozen women. Human Negotiations is not a journalistic account of the sex trade, but instead a personal interpretation of a line of work that is frequently misunderstood. Leaving aside stereotypes of exploited, downtrodden Third World females coerced into a profession in which they are passive victims, the project reveals a more nuanced, open-ended world where women take center stage, and where reality‘s complexities leave room for wider interpretations. Documentary photographs and fictional vignettes based on personal interviews focus on subjects who have not been coerced into their jobs, but who choose to work in the sex industry as a means towards a better life: a mother supporting a child, a ladyboy saving up for cosmetic surgery, a girl from the countryside looking to strike it rich in the big city, a woman living the lifestyle to enable her own freedom and independence. www.katharinahesse.com
Lady into Hut “My Grandfather, aged 27 was holidaying with his family in a hut in a valley among the Scottish Hills and making a home movie of the holiday. The year was 1947. He saw a young local girl and asked her mother if she could be in his film. She said yes. Mary was 17 and they started filming shortly afterwards. In the making of the film, they fell in love. They married and gave birth to my mother in 1948. Grandad built his own holiday hut in the place that Laura Hynd they met. With no electricity or London, UK water you are left to the green hills to survive. It is a simple place. The fresh burns (Scottish for stream) flow through the valley. We scattered my Grandfather‘s ashes next to the hut on July 22nd 2010.” Laura Hynd is a Scottish photographer who moved to England at an early age. She worked as a Creative Designer before moving to London to work as a Photo Editor for several years. She left to pursue her love of making photographs in 2005. Hynd‘s approach is natural, honest & organic with a twist of sumptuousness and humour, all of which reflects her personality. She concentrates on people and the living landscape. www.laurahynd.com
Chelsea Hotel Linda Troeller, a resident for twenty years at the Chelsea Hotel, is an award-winning photographer. Chelsea Hotel “My photographs at the Chelsea Hotel investigate the power of place and social and physical borderlines. The Chelsea Hotel is where I have felt the most comfortable being an artist. There was an accepting atmosphere. I met people such as Alexander McQueen who talked to me in the lobby, came to see my Linda Troeller photographs and invited me to his New York, USA fashion show. Such influences and the skylight over the famous staircase inspired me to make an image wearing a Zach Posen dress. Zac was absorbed by Bohemia, like myself. He hung out there as a teenager. Self-portraiture has a long tradition such as artists Lucas Samaras, Nan Goldman, and Taryn Simon who weave their personal evolution to the larger sphere with their projects. My self-portraits show a mental space, a kind of physical manifestation of the hotel itself mingling sadness‘s with the rapture of new beginnings.” www.lindatroeller.com
New Jersey - Philadelphia “I was hired by the State Museum of New Jersey to capture “the face of New Jersey”. The Philadelphia and NJ photographs, taken in 1968, represent my earliest photographic series.” Mariette has been a professional photographer, writer and speaker on, and on behalf of, the TG community since 1978. She is the author of Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them and The Gender Frontier , which won a Mariette Pathy Allen 2004 Lambda Literary Award. Her New York, USA photographs make a significant contribution to Leslie Feinberg‘s Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, illustrate Riki Anne Wilchins‘ Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender and are included in many other books. She has worked on five documentary films, the most recent being A&E -- Investigative Reports “Transgender Revolution”, and Southern Comfort , which won the Grand Jury prize at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. Mariette has been on the staff of The Transgender Tapestry since the mid-1980s. She received a Trinity Award in 1991, an award from Fantasia Fair in 2001, for her artistic contributions on behalf of the transgender community, and a Rainbow Award at IFGE 2006. Her photographs are included in national and international collections and have been exhibited widely. “TransCuba”, Mariette‘s new book, to be published by Daylight Books, will be released in March 2014. www.mariettepathyallen.com
Rift / Fault Marion Belanger is interested in the concepts of persistence and change, particularly in regards to the land. “Rift/Fault is photographic study of the land-based edges of the North American Continental Plate in Iceland (Rift) and California (Fault). Rift refers to the eastern edge of the North American Plate where it meets the Eurasian Plate, along the Mid-Atlantic Rift in Iceland. Due to the western movement of the North Marion Belanger American Plate relative to the EuGuilfort, USA rasian Plate, new crust is formed as magma pushes up from the mantle. For this reason, the land along the Rift is unstable and raw. My images from Iceland document the land and structures pertaining to geothermal electricity, hot pools, volcanic excavation sites, houses, new earth, and cultural relics within the landscape. The visibility of the tectonic rift is highly evident. Fault is a study of the shifting western edge of the North American Continental Plate, along the San Andreas Fault. I am interested in the visual traces (or not) of the tectonic plate edge as well as in the artifacts of our built environment upon these edges. The San Andreas Fault begins at the Salton Sea and runs for approximately 675 miles to Cape Mendocino. I photographed housing developments, wind turbines, earthquake monitors, roads, and the geologic fact of the Fault itself. While the San Andreas Fault is characterized by earthquake activity, the landscape is often striking in its visual normalcy; the ordered built environment seems to ignore the actuality of the land. Rift /Fault portrays moments of quiet anticipation in settings that shift between the wild and the contained, the fertile and the barren, the geologic and the human. The dichotomy creates a visual tension that questions the uneasy relationship between geologic force and the limits of human intervention.� www.marionbelanger.com.
Teen Tribe Martine Fougeron is a fine art photographer living and working in New York whose work has been exhibited internationally and is held in major public and private collections. Fougeron was born in Paris and studied at LFNY, l‘Institut d‘Études Politiques de Paris, Wellesley College and the International Center of Photography. She has been living in New York since 1996 and working as a photographer, having turned to photography after a successful Martine Fougeron career as a Creative Director in the New York, USA fragrance industry where she was the ‘nose of the noses’ of 20 worldclass perfumers. Fougeron‘s primary fine art photography project since 2005 has been the ‘Teen Tribe’ series. “Martine Fougeron‘s Teen Tribe is an intimate portrait of her sons and their friends in both New York and France. From a unique perspective, the series is a coming of age story depicting the universal desire to become both a strong individual and part of a group. Fougeron began her series, Teen Tribe, in 2005 when her two Franco-American sons were 13 and 14 and followed them for six years. Fougeron explains, “The work explores adolescence as a liminal state, between childhood and adulthood, between the feminine and the masculine and between innocence and a burgeoning self-identity. The focus is on the adolescents‘ heightened states of mind.” The gaze is telling in these pictures. The boys are figuring out who they are and who they want to become while staring out at both their mother and the artist, the push and pull of separating from family while gaining strength from it. Growing up is not always easy, but Fougeron gracefully shows us the metamorphosis in all its complicated beauty.” (Text by Cory Jacobs, curator of the Gallery at Hermès in New York City)
www.martinefougeron.com
Forever Marilyn MaryAnn (Bruchac) Lynch, born, raised and based in New York State, traveling widely. Photographer/filmmaker, publisher/writer and Director of Mary Ann Lynch Productions. Married with a son and daughter and grandchild. She lives surrounded by family. Self-taught, I gravitated toward cameras as a child, inspired by an uncle with a Graflex. Later I took workshops with Ansel Adams, A.D. Coleman, Robert Heinecken, Joyce Tenneson, Mary Ann Lynch Minor White and more. My bio and New York, USA website reveal some of the terrain I‘ve covered over the past 40 years of photographing and creating audiences for photography. “For fifteen years, beginning in 1990, I photographed Marilyn Monroe throughout the world, from Puerto Rico to Paris, and from Equador to the Mojave Desert and throughout the United States. I got used to seeing Marilyn‘s image wherever I traveled, and meeting fans, devotees, admirers, impersonators, and those fascinated with her – everywhere. After working on the project for two years I realized that I could go anywhere in the world and hold up a photograph of Marilyn Monroe and get a smile. She‘s a global ambassador of Love. Call her a screen goddess or an icon, a legend, a role model or a modern-day Aphrodite or Venus – however we think of her, Marilyn lives on.” http://www.maryannlynch.com
Lands End “These photographs were made during multiple extended visits to Hornby Island, exploring the territory through a sequence of still-lives, landscapes and performative interventions. These work presents reveries of living a life of simplicity and contemplation - showing some extraordinary interiors of cabins, caravans, boats and other homes. As the back-to-the-land movement blossomed, a large wave of settlers chose this island for its relative seclusion and flourishing social vision. This Melissa Moore community remains visionary and London, UK the island still offers an escape from unsustainable consumerism and the dismay of mainstream politics. Looking at the self-built houses we see an odyssey of countercultural living; interiors full of a concatenation of produce, icons, tools, hoarded scrap metal and other compendia of resourcefulness. The experience of being zoomed out also affords certain perspicacity regarding potential relationships with nature. The island lays bare the evidence of a whole ecology; the rest of the ‘choir’ can be heard there. Its landscape includes a distinctive sandstone coastline - under a fascinated, animistic gaze, rocks reveal ancient petroglyphs and anthropomorphic shapes. Enchanted by the natural balance I witnessed on Hornby Island, I named part of my practice to be ‘working on the feedback between art and nature’.” Melissa Moore is a London based artist. She studied at Manchester Metropolitan University; University for Arts Linz, Austria, and has a Master‘s Degree with a Distinction for research from the Royal College of Art. She is represented by Metronom Gallery, Modena, Italy and Anzenberger Gallery, Vienna, Austria. She is an Associate Lecturer at the University of the Arts London. Her work resides in both public and private collections. www.melissamoore.info
Tokyo Shock Ikeda Midori Born in Aichi, Japan 1964 Midori Mitamura has exhibited her works widely in various countries around the globe since 1993. In 2006, she held a solo exhibition in Secession Vienna. Her installations structure space through the combination of various materials such as photos, images, music, words, Midori Mitamura daily objects so as to pretend “a Tokyo, Japan drama which people can venture into.“ The objects displayed in the space exist like picture book illustrations and the people who view them can imagine a story from each item. Her artworks try to share with people awkward and endearing emotion and memory that are familiar and close to anyone and everyone‘s lives through the everyday details of life. www.midorimitamura.com
A Girl and Her Room Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. Originally trained as an architect at the American University of Beirut and at Cornell University, she studied photography at the New England School of Photography and the Maine Photographic Workshops. “This project is about teenage girls and young women at a transitional time of their lives, alone in the privacy of their own personal space and surroundings: their bedroom, a womb within Rania Matar the outside world. Boston, USA As a mother of a teenage daughter I watch her passage from girlhood into adulthood, fascinated with the transformation taking place, the adult personality shaping up and a self-consciousness now replacing the carefree world she had known and lived in so far. I started photographing her and her girlfriends, and quickly realized that they were very aware of each other‘s presence, and that their being in a group affected very much whom they were portraying to the world. From there, emerged the idea of photographing each girl alone in her personal space. I spend time with each girl, so she is comfortable with me and eventually the photography session becomes a beautiful and intimate collaboration. I was discovering a person on the cusp on becoming an adult, but desperately holding on to the child she barely outgrew, a person on the edge between two worlds, trying to come to terms with this transitional time in her life and adjust to the person she is turning into. Posters of rock stars, political leaders or top models were displayed above a bed covered with stuffed animals; mirrors were an important part of the room, a reflection of the girls‘ image to the world; personal objects, photos, clothes everywhere, chaotic jumbles of pink and black make-up and just stuff, seemed to give a sense of security and warmth to the room like a womb within the outside world.” www.raniamatar.com
My Dakota “In 2005, I set out to photograph my home state of South Dakota, a sparsely populated frontier state on the Great Plains with more buffalo, pronghorn, coyotes, mule deer, and prairie dogs than people. It‘s a land of powwows and rodeos, a corn palace and a buffalo roundup; a harsh and beautiful landscape dominated by space, silence, and solitude, by brutal wind and extreme weather; a former Wild West territory where European and Lakota peoples clasRebecca Norris Webb hed, and where cultural tensions Brooklyn, USA still linger; a landscape littered with the broken and the abandoned; a place I‘d learned to love in all its complexity. The next year, my brother, Dave, died unexpectedly of heart failure. For months, one of the few things that eased my unsettled heart was the landscape of South Dakota. It seemed all I could do was drive and photograph. I began to wonder – Does loss have its own geography? –” Originally a poet, Rebecca Norris Webb has published three photography books that explore the complicated relationship between people and the natural world – The Glass Between Us, Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs from Cuba (with Alex Webb), and My Dakota, which interweaves her text and photographs from her home state of South Dakota. www.webbnorriswebb.co
No Crybabies Régina Monfort is a photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Born in Brittany, France in 1958, she studied photography in Brussels, Belgium before moving to the Unites States in 1984. She worked with abstract, experimental portraiture and body landscapes before engaging in the documentary tradition. In 1994 she began photographing young people in the Latino Community, a short walking distance from her own home in Brooklyn. Over the Régina Monfort years her work has continued to Brooklyn, USA explore the human heart. In 1998, she was nominated in the Human Spirit Essay category for the annual Alfred Eisenstaedt Award in Magazine Photography. That same year, with grants from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, she produced outdoor audiovisual presentations in Brooklyn parks. Her work exploring the impacts of methamphetamine addiction on individuals and families in Topeka, Kansas, was awarded the 2005 French Bourse du Talent for Reportage. No Crybabies “Twenty years ago, I walked beyond Grand Street. In the heart of Brooklyn, New York, I befriended young souls growing up quickly in a deeply rooted Latino community, striving for love and respect. Over the course of nine years, I felt immersed in their hopes and dreams. The photographs were born out of trust, as moments of grace and sorrow unfolded daily before my very eyes ...” www.reginamonfort.com
The Dwarf Empire Born in Antwerp (Belgium) in 1987. Graduated as Master of Fine Arts, Photography a KASK (Royal Academy of Fine Arts) in Ghent with great honours, June 2012. Currently working as freelancer for ‘De Volkskrant‘ and living in Amsterdam, Netherlands. “Dear Visitor, the World Ecological Garden of Butterfly and the Dwarf Empire welcome you! The Sanne de Wilde Dwarf Empire is very grateful for Amsterdam, Netherlands the sympathy and support off all the people in the world. Every morning and afternoon our emperor and his subjects will offer you a spectacular show.” “In southern China, near Kunming – the city of eternal spring – exists a theme park that is home to 77 little people. The inhabitants present a song-and-dance show twice a day. This promised land was founded by a tall, rich man who was determined to ‘do something good’ for the little people. Chinese charity dressed in commercial attire. The facade of this empire, with its walls of synthetic material, permanently seems on the verge of collapse. Nevertheless, the empire holds its ground. I embarked on an adventure with a handful of ethical questions about commercialising social care. Every story has two sides but in this place every question and every answer seemed contradictory. My adventure ended up as a modern (anti)fairytale, a collection of images of my making, and theirs. My own trick forced upon myself.” www.sannedewilde.com
Mectoub Scarlett Coten is an independent french female photographer. She lives between Paris and Marrakech and works in North Africa and the middleeast. Most of Scarlett‘s works focusing on long-term projects. Arab culture has so fascinated her that for over a decade it has been the main theme of her photography. “Arab culture has so fascinated me that for over a decade it has been the main theme of my photograScarlett Coten phy. My current project, “Mectoub“, Paris, France focuses on men, particularly the young urban generation who since early 2011 have been calling widely for greater individual freedom. Since 2012, I have worked in Moroccan and Egyptian cities, where I intuitively select male strangers to ask to pose for portraits. I take them aside, away from social pressures, and set them against backgrounds of my choosing. The idea is to create a space of intimacy in which they will feel relaxed and free enough to reveal something of their inner selves, their personality, their sensitivity, their fragility or their sensuality. In countries where freedom is hidden, exposing oneself is an act of rebellion. In my role as a female foreigner, I challenge them to be as real as possible, offering them the opportunity to turn conventions upside down. The portraits are therefore collaborations between cultures that might broaden for both the idea of what it means to be an Arab man today.” www.scarlettcoten.com
Not In Your Face When George Harrison arrived in New York for the Beatles‘ historic visit he was carrying a Pentax Spotmatic as he descended the airplane‘s steps. Susan Barnett, then 15 years old, soon bought the same Pentax and began to photograph her everyday life such as it appeared to her. With a formal education in Art History and Studio Art, she landed a job at Perls Galleries on Madison Avenue, where she worked for twelve years as Associate Director. Susan Barnett Next door to Perls Galleries was New York, USA Light Gallery, one of the earliest galleries to show Contemporary Photography. There Susan experienced first hand the work of Steven Shore and Lee Friedlandler. In 1990 she went back to school to study graphic design and computer based photography at the School of Visual Arts, where she studied with Milton Glaser and Paul Davis. Susan currently lives in Manhattan, where she maintains a working studio in Tribeca and sails in Hampton Bays. In the series “Not In Your Face” the t-shirt is starkly evident but these photographs are not about the t-shirt per se. They are about the stories of people who tell their own story. I look for individuals who stand out in a crowd by their choice of the message on their back. The messages are combinations of pictures and words that are appropriated from contemporary culture but have the unique effect of mixing up meanings and creating new meanings. On the streets these personalities create their own iconography that explore the cultural, political and social issues that have an impact on our everyday lives. http://notinyourface.com
Not Yet Titled Susan Lipper was born and raised in New York City. After studying English Romantic Poetry in college with a concentration on Yeats (including her junior year abroad in London), she graduated with an MFA in photography from Yale School of Art in 1983. “Functioning as a time capsule of associations, this series is perhaps more defined by its dates than by words. The images began as a loose narrative in 1999. At the time, I Susan Lipper found myself drawn to military and New York, USA Cold War references. Equally I was seeking an unembodied vantage point, one not set in a specific geographic locale. The series was finished in August 2001. In the period that followed, due to world events, I could not reconnect to the place I had been when the pictures were made. In 2002, an anonymous collaborator, also from New York, spontaneously paired some of the images acting both as an historic witness and also as an element of chance or synchronicity.� www.susanlipper.com
Silent Dialogs Born in Ukraine (USSR) in 1979, lived in North of Russia 1985-1990, lived in Israel 1990-1996, immigrated to Canada (Montral) in 1996, studied and lived in USA (New York) from 2006-2013, currently living and working in Germany (Berlin). “Where is the border between one person and another? Where our horizons are crossing? What really defines closeness? Our families‘ models of intimacy often become Viktoria Sorochinski a burden that we carry throughout Berlin, Germany life. Starting with our parents, who are the prototypes of all our future relationships, we are all straggling with these questions everyday. Strengths, weaknesses, conflicts, fears, pathologies, unresolved issues of relationships with each other – all these psychological aspects of humanity are the subject of my visual and conceptual investigation. “Silent Dialogs“ is my most recent ongoing project. In it, I portray people in moments of psychological encounter with themselves, and with those who are close to them. During these moments of selfreflection and internal dialog, a certain truth about the relationship is revealed. All the subjects are real people in real relationships, but the scenes are moderately orchestrated in order to bring out the essence of their particular bond. My work process is very intuitive and my aim as an artist is to create the conditions that will allow these moments of revelation to occur in front of my camera. To that end, all the photographs are shot in the subject‘s intimate environment.” www.viktoria-sorochinski.com
Paris Haute Couture 1958 The Cologne-based photographer (1923-2011) is primarily known for her fashion shots from the 50‘s. Walde Huth was an exceptional woman as well as a creative artist and multi-faceted photographer. Full of imagination and energy, headstrong and spontaneous, poetic and insistent, her work is blessed by an infallible sense for staging, perfect light and graphic composition of the image. Austere objects, emphatic portraits and playful fashion shots know to capture the eye of the observer. Walde Huth Walde Huth was born in Stuttgart in Cologne, Germany 1923. After finishing school, she wanted to embark on her dream of an acting career, but instead studied in Weimar at the School for Applied Art and Craft with Walter Hege, the most important architecture photographer of his time. With the war in full swing and to avoid the draft to forced labor, the young photographer joined the Agfa company in Wolfen, the leading lab for color development. Reluctant at first (“color is kitsch”), she learns to appreciate the possibility color composition offers. After the war, she founded her own studio in the city of Esslingen. Her photographic focus is influenced by the modern visual language of “Neue Fotografie”, which originated in the 20‘s and whose subjective interpretation shaped mid-century photography. Walde Huth explores all kinds of photography and offers portraits, stage shots, advertising and fashion photography. Her most iconic fashion images are taken in Paris. She captures the most famous models of her time, not in a studio but on location in the city. Huth‘s art garners attention, not only in German magazines. Together with her husband Karl Hugo Schmoelz, an architectural photographer, Walde Huth manages their studio, schmoelz+huth, from 1958 until her husband‘s death in 1986. In 2006, Huth sells the entire schmoelz+huth archive as well as the body of her own photographic work to the Cologne-based collector Horst Glaeser. Full of energy, Huth continued to experiment with innovative creative methods. She died during a fire in her apartment in 2011. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walde_Huth
Immersed in Living Water Wendy Sacks grew up in Connecticut, and earned a medical degree in pediatric medicine and then pursued an advanced fellowship in pediatric emergency medicine. In her mid thirties a connective tissue disease shortened her career in medicine making it impossible for her to continue in her career of choice. In 2010, she discovered a way to express herself through photography and she has subsequently shared this self expression with a global Wendy Sacks community. Rochester, USA “While working as a Pediatric Emergency Physician, I carried a camera to document ill patients. These images were used for teaching and documentation. Photography combined the grief associated with sufferings and sometimes deaths. It also dealt with the wave of despair which can be overwhelming. In order to maintain professionalism and composure, separating self from distressing emotions was unknowingly interwoven into photographs. As a mother, I brought a camera back into my life to capture my own children. To perform some of the activities of daily living, an occupational therapist suggested I bathe with my young children since I could not lift them into the tub. Eventually, I brought my camera to the tub. When I looked through the lens this time, life and death looked different to me. Through the lens, I remembered my world of medicine, I remembered the children who were sick and had died in my care,the children who had been born and who had healed, the children whom I barely had time to mourn or to celebrate their lives while working as a physician. Overwhelming feelings sealed away in my subconscious began to emerge. Water has become my medium of choice by chance. It has become a medium for physical and emotional healing.� http://wendysacks.photoshelter.com
Imprint Published on the occasion of the exhibition: “Ladies only” Tsereteli Museum of Modern Art - Tbilisi, Georgia Organized for Kolga Tbilisi Photo - May 2014 Exhibition Concept: Tina Schelhorn Newspaper Concept: Norbert Goertz and Tina Schelhorn Newspaper Layout: Norbert Goertz © by the photographers