OF THE AFTERNOON
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unseen
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Second Edition 26–29 Sept 2013
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Susie Tsang
Elena Montmurro
Bertrand Cavalier
Pablo Castilla
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CONTENTS Interviews Portfolio Overview
Aaron McElroy Laughlin Portfolio Sam Overview 0634
Susie Tsang
12
Elena Montemurro
18
Bertrand Cavalier
24
Pablo Castilla
Max Pinkers Natalie Krick Interviews
46
Essay Eva Stenram 76
3054
Aaron McElroy66
42
Sam Laughlin
52
Natalie Krick
62
Max Pinckers
Exhibition Preview Memymom 80
72
Essay Eva Stenram: Discomforting Domesticity
Exhibition Preview 80
Memymom: Marilène Coolens and Lisa De Boeck
Q&A 84
Melk Gallery
ISSUE #3 ISSN 2053-3594 Hello@oftheafternoon.com Of The Afternoon is published in Manchester, UK. Advertise@oftheafternoon.com Of The Afternoon is published in Manchester, UK. Image © Eva Stenram
What’s Left Is Unsaid Every few years, I would go through this ritual of sitting on the floor, opening the cabinet door and flick through my family photos to find my childhood memories. This process initiates thoughts about my family relationships and how disconnected they are. This ritual opens up the exploration of a delicate and an intricate relationship with my mother. Questioning the role of culture and the influence it has on identity is the catalyst that created the current state of our relationship. Our conversations are limited to what our vocabulary allows and this leads to a lot of things that are unsaid. The project wasn’t what it started out as and at some point during the research process, the nature of the work changed. I wanted an end to this on-going cycle of thoughts and regrets and this gave me reason to create this piece of work. In my research process, I came across Dinu Li’s ‘The Mother of All Journeys’. I was attracted to this project as Li was collaborating with his mother who had began her Journey in China and made her way to England through Hong Kong. This was a journey my mother (and so many others) had taken too. Another photographer I came across was Kurt Tong’s ‘The Queen, The Chairman and I’. In the statement he writes, “How Chinese Am I or indeed, Who am I?” This question really stunned me. Both photographers used found photographs, documents and their own photographs to explore their ideas. I wanted to do something similar but deviate from what they were doing. I don’t think its complete, but it is for this chapter. There were things I wanted to do like go to Hong Kong and China to connect with my extended family and this is something I can do now. I’m not sure what will come out of it, I’ve not thought that far ahead. I’ve been working on this project for about 8 months so I’m going to take a break from it and work on another project. Susie Tsang
Coming of Age The project Coming of Age is a series of photos that reflect my views of American Youth. Using movies as references, I stage scenarios i feel depicts the stereotype I am trying to portray. I want to show the struggle of growing up, those moments you get yourself into, awkward experiences. Each photo is heartbreaking. I was taking pictures I wanted to take, staging scenarios that felt familiar, that i wanted to bring to life. All of the different types of people that I’ve come across were my biggest inspiration for this project. I had so many ideas for different characters to portray, I’m still determined to bring them to life through my photography. A lot of classic photographers like Larry Clark, William Eggleston, Nan Golden, Saul Leiter, they all have elements in their photography that truly inspire me. This series is never-ending for me. This is usually how I shoot, it’s a style I always refer back to. Coming of age is a theme I feel I can always return to. Elena Montemurro
Costa Tropical After studying photography and painting in Fine Arts University in Granada, Andalusia, I moved to Brussels where I signed up for school again and completed a Master degree in Documentary Film making. The practice of documentary film-making revealed to me a insatiable appetite for going out in the world and meet strangers. It also showed to me that it wasn’t so much about the medium of film itself, but about a kind of vital practice of confronting new realities, translate them into a visual form and share the result of my fascination about it with more humans. I mostly walk to get to the places, and I mostly don’t know where I’m going to. The heavy equipment slows me down, which forces me to be more present and better connect with where I am. So, it is only after having walked for a while that I can begin to observe. And only then I consider photographing. There is this (almost eery) moment every day in Andalusia in between 14h and 17h, when the heat is at its peak and work is suspended and people return home for lunch and siesta, that the streets are left empty and silent. There is literally almost no one out there and a sense of timelessness or suspension takes over. The occasional people and other “elements” that remain left on the surface of that different (indifferent) landscape, seem to appear detached, isolated, disconnected even. Also, surrounded as they are by that emptiness, their presence is magnified, augmented, so new spacial and semantic relations are born among them, filled with renewed tension. In many cases a sense of absurdity emerges; other times is thrill, or comedy... It’s like witnessing the ongoing random stream of events of an unscripted earthly piece. And In the middle of that all, standing with my camera, I always carry secret hope to catch some kind of truth. Pablo Castilla
After Wake
Aaron McElroy (b. 1978, Daytona, FL) is a photographer living and working in Brooklyn, NY. McElroy’s first book, After Wake, was published by Ampersand in March 2013 and the launch was accompanied by a solo show at Ampersand Gallery. After studying at the New England School of Photography, McElroy’s work has also been shown at FOAM Photography Museum in Amsterdam, Chelsea Art Museum in NY, and earlier this year, the Horton Gallery held his first New York solo show, titled 200 and Something Notes. James Duncan Clark recently caught up with Aaron for a chat. How did you first get into photography? It was really random... I’d never thought of photography as being this kind of art form – I was never interested in art. I was a bike messenger and I was working and doing a lot of racing and someone was taking pictures and told me that if I was interested I should just do it – I should just make pictures. I started taking pictures because I wanted to fill up my apartment. After that I started taking classes. So you went to college in the end? I went to a two year technical photography school. You didn’t need a degree to get in – it was along the lines of: ‘You like photography? Well, we’d like your money’. So I basically just got involved really quickly and it opened itself up in ways that I didn’t think were possible. It introduced me to the art world, and art and photography being the same thing – which I didn’t agree with at first. I was initially antiphoto-making and I had only really thought of taking pictures as a way of capturing memories. How long were you actually working on After Wake before it made its way into a book? After Wake just unveiled itself to me out of the blue because I didn’t really need to change anything – I had the images and I had the work already. It wasn’t anything new that I was doing – I had created this vocabulary of images and it was just about editing it into a book form. I found the edit and sequencing of the book to be particularly successful – in terms of the pacing and the recurring motifs – how easily did it all come together? It happened really easily. It was very of the moment, but very of my heart. Some of the work is older and some of it is newer, but I’m taking sentences from my visual catalogue and the act of putting them down on paper really made sense. The undercurrents that I pick up on within the book are themes of life cycles, fertility and renewal - I’m specifically thinking of the floral
patterns, plants and flowers that are either in full bloom or dying and the get well soon message. Would you say those are fair interpretations? You know, you do these interviews and people talk about your work and you start to realise and identify with the things that you didn’t understand while you were making the work… Yeah, the things that other people see? Yeah, After Wake is about three or four years of work extracted from a larger body - so it’s a smaller narrative within the greater scheme of things, but [your description] really fits. And working with Ampersand really helped me put the edition together. How important were the Self Publish Be Naughty and Nocturnes publications in terms of shaping exactly how you wanted your own book to function? Did they give you ideas on how you wanted After Wake to be when it came out in its own right? No, not really. Every time I’ve done a book it’s been a totally different experience. I’ve been fortunate because each publisher I’ve worked with has let me have my opinion on exactly how I think the work should be. They pretty much gave me freedom and there was no trade-off. When I look at the photographs of the women, I cannot help but be intrigued by the imagemaking process: why and how they came to be naked or semi-naked before your lens in these domestic settings. However, I sense that this is something that you would prefer to remain mysterious or open-ended for the audience. How much of the magic is within the secret? The magic is in the secrets. Nobody wants to know… it’s an open-ended story. It’s about the experience. It’s about looking at the images and not knowing where they come from or how they are created. Just that they exist - from a voyeuristic perspective. I want the viewers to have a different feeling. I imagine it in some ways as a fragment of invented consciousness perhaps… it’s some kind of form of escape and you can take it anywhere you want to. Absolutely. Sometimes people think the work can objectify women, because of the juxtaposition of women and objects but that’s just not the point. It’s what I’m seeing and that’s what I’m trying to translate to paper. It’s just about trying to look at it from an outside perspective – you’re looking into something. Rather than looking into my world, you’re looking into your own world. In relation to that, how much do you deliberately want to play on the ambiguities within the work – in terms of who exactly these women are? You’ve very consciously anonymised them, can you talk a little about what you wanted to achieve through this process?
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The Fourth Wall
The Dancer and The Hunter, 2012
The Mask Dance, 2012
Supplementing the Pause with a Distraction, 2012
The Birds, 2012
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Drape
Eva Stenram, Drape (Cavalcade III)
Eva Stenram, Drape VII
Eva Stenram, Drape X
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The Umbilical Vein Exhibition Preview
Marilène Coolens photographed her daughter Lisa De Boeck from 1990 to 2003, while playing improvised theatrical sketches. On the bed, at the table or between the curtains in their house in Brussels, we watch the five-year-old girl growing up. De Brakke Grond presents the first ever exhibition of this analogue archive, which has been hidden away for years.
If you look more closely, you can see Catwoman and the First Lady.
The Umbilical Vein deals with identity, metamorphosis and familial relationships. It reveals both the foundations of the close mother-daughter bond and the professional career of this artistic duo, who have worked together under the name Memymom since 2004.
Who first had the idea of an exhibition of this work?
The photos lay down a challenge and have an alienating quality. Are they a reflection of current developments, or an innocent mother-daughter ritual? The imaginative characters emerged from the artists’ experience of the 1990s. They found inspiration in passers-by on the street, icons and stereotypes. The fact we don’t see Lisa smile has a tragic aspect, but don’t be fooled.
The rough analogue images of a past era form a source of inspiration for the artists’ current work. We caught up with Lisa De Boeck to discuss the upcoming exhibition ‘The Umbilical Vein’.
It started back in the beginning of 2000, when my father was looking at our images and after thoroughly thinking it through he said: “You should make a book”. That is something, even when being a teenager, I never forgot. We had put the analogue archive in boxes on the shelf back in 2003 and headed into our first digital decade. It was back in 2010 it popped back into my thoughts, mainly because you gain more experience when working a longer time with images, your choices become more clear, so the desire to bundle and understand this work became greater
and felt like a necessity. So I decided to make a first very rough selection, had to go through 1000 images and scanned those a year later to get a better overview of the work and images we were dealing with. The only plan at first was simply making a photo book, but soon after I started believing that we should also exhibit this work. And that is because I just feel we had to, it’s that simple. I had understood from my father’s point of view and vision what he had meant and I had the gut to enlarge that idea. What does it feel like having these fairly intimate images of your childhood exhibited? We didn’t intend to show these images when we made them, so it’s an interesting process, I can assure that. I learned to distance myself from these images in a way, as if I’m observing from the woods that run aside memory lane. Certainly when making this book and preparing the exhibition, you’re constantly confronted with your childhood that is slightly more extravagant and
Memymom, The Junkie High on Love
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MELK Q&A
young photographers from Scandinavia, with most of them studying in Gothenburg, London, Germany but very few in Norway. When they came back to Norway they didn’t know eachother; they had all of this knowledge and passion but they didn’t come together. We have an established photographers gallery in Oslo that has been running since 1977 but they weren’t seeing this young scene, as we saw it they were kind of ignoring it, they were doing some projects but not the the extent that we felt was necessary. We decided to do something about this. Instead of just focussing on Oslo, we decided to focus on Scandinavia and try to bring together the new generation of Scandinavian photographers. What sort of work do you primarily exhibit? As aforementioned we focus on photography by artists in the beginning of their career. Though, we have focused in artists that we feel contribute a discourse within the field of contemporary photography. The main interest lies within the medium, it’s position today and its possibilities as well as limits.
MELK is an artist run initiative for new Scandinavian photography. The aim for the initiative is to raise the awarness of the scene of fine- art photographers in the region and the position of the medium today. Since the project was founded in 2009 the gallery space in central Oslo has hosted several solo exhibitions been invited to curate two major exhibitions at renowed art institutions in Norway. In addition, MELK has been active in promoting the involved artists in institusions and through fairs across Europe. MELK is found at Borggata 7 in Oslo. The space sports a 80sqm projectsspace/gallery, shared studio facilities and storage space. The gallery houses four exhibitions a year and serves as a project space for the involved artists. The goal for the space is to create links between artists and audience, as well as a space for discussion, work and sharing of ideas.
First of all, can you tell us a bit about MELK, and how this came about? MELK is an initiative for New Scandinavian photography. Our aim is to function as a space where exhibitions, talks, book launches and discussions can take place as a platform for future networks and possible collaborations. Since the founding in 2009 we have focused on promoting the new generation of photographers in Scandinavia. MELK started out as a spontaneous idea between me and co-founder Behzad Farazollahi as we felt there
was no space in Scandinavia that took the strong new generation seriously. We opened up the small gallery in Oslo and have later moved on to a larger space. Of about 25 solo exhibitions most of them have been the artists first, as well as curated group exhibitions for more established institutions and participation at art fairs. Now we are four people working for the initiative and focus more internationally and look for possible spaces to curate exhibitions abroad. We were seeing all of these talented
How does the photography scene in Oslo compare to London? Oslo is a small town, though it has experienced a recent flow of positive attention as a result of a strong new generation of artists and curators that are opening up independent galleries. Much similar to Peckham in South London, East Oslo’s Grønland and Tøyen are evolving to a interesting parts of town where several independent galleries have opened recently. Though, as the town is small many artists study abroad and come back to Oslo with experience that needs to be shared. I think this makes the art scene strong, as the independent spaces are crucial for networking and sharing of new ideas. Oslo differs as it is still writing its history, thus making it an interesting city to be part of.
You can learn more about Melk and their exhibition program by visitiing the website. www.melkgalleri.no
OFTHEAFTERNOON.com facebook.com/OFTHEAFTERNOON instagram.com/OFTHEAFTERNOON Image: Max Pinckers, Mona Lisa ,2012