Be t w
e c a p S n ee
Susana Lopez Fernandez Kishan Panchal Steve Perfect Philippa Wilkinson
Photographs by: Susana Lopez Fernandez susanalopez.fernandez@gmail.com
Design by: Mandana Ahmadvazir designer@viewfinder.org.uk
Kishan Panchal kishan72@hotmail.com
Also available as a colour, e-publication: www.viewfinder.org.uk/shop
Steve Perfect steve.perfect@hotmail.co.uk Philippa Wilkinson twospoonsmaloy@hotmail.com
Published by: Viewfinder Photography Gallery 52 Brixton Village London SW9 8PS
Curated by: Kathleen Brey kathleen@viewfinder.org.uk
www.viewfinder.org.uk
Edited by: Kathleen Sadler kmgsadler@live.com
Š The artists and authors. The views expressed in this publication are not necessarily the views of the publisher or the editors.
First published April 2011
Susana Lopez Fernandez susanalopez.fernandez@gmail.com
LAST CALL An airport is a tract of land where aircraft land and take off, usually equipped with hard-surfaced landing strips, a control tower, hangars, aircraft maintenance and refueling facilities, and accommodations for passengers and cargo. But an airport is actually much more than that. An airport is a conglomeration of all cultures, it is a place of floating bodies, of people in limbo, a place where everyone is waiting to be somewhere else, it is a place of contradictions. It is a non-place. It is dead time. It is the ultimate waiting room. And yet it is a center of contemporary culture. An airport is a place where identity is scrutinized thoroughly, and also shed like a snakeskin. We become anonymous and homogeneous. Other authors have talked about airports before: In 1993 the french director Philippe Lioret directed the film TombÊs du ciel, a story about the Iranian refugee Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who lived several years in Charles de Gaulle Airport (Paris). This film was awarded in San Sebastian Film Festival and Yubari International Film Festival in 1993. Later, in 2004, Steven Spielberg made The TERMINAL, another film about Mehran Karimi Nasseri. A film starring Tom Hanks in a New York airport. The Turner Prize winner in 2007, Mark Wallinger, had a video on exhibit at the Morris Gallery at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Threshold to the Kingdom, made in 2002. The narrative is simple – passengers arriving at London’s International Arrivals terminal come through the double doors toward a static camera. Some of the travelers have people waiting for them. One of the travelers looks confused as he checks and rechecks a scrap of paper. Others stride forward with business-like determination. Have you ever gone through the same thing? When you arrive at an airport and read in the monitor that your flight is delayed, you never know for how long and you have to wait at the airport waiting room. What do you do there? Some months ago, while I was waiting to board, I was thinking about how many times I had been before and how many times I would be in the future in the same situation. That evening I began to think about this: about all the airports I had been waiting at and all the airports I would be waiting at before boarding and I wonder why it is that I like some airports and not others. In those days I was working in a project which was born online, so I decided to create a blog as a way to invite artists and non-artists to talk about their
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experiences at airports. LASTCALL, is an open project which was born as a reflection of many hours spent at airports waiting to fly. Artists and non-artists have the opportunity to send their photos and opinions about the time spent at airports around the world. 6
Kishan Panchal kishan72@hotmail.com
76 Merlin House My photographic works are based around family life, documenting my experience as I mature and reflect on my existence and surrounding. My work is currently still expanding and I feel that I am only at the beginning of my photographic career/education. As an Indian photographer my work on family domesticity is important for people to acknowledge within the 21st century in comparison to the past and what the future brings. As a conceptual artist my work is often staged with conceptual meaning behind the images, as well as historical references from my father’s images. This makes my work unique from others. My work is heavily influenced by my culture and religion; this is shown continually through my work and my personality. My work over the years has progressed from landscapes of previous residential areas to a more concentrated subject regarding the family home which include my emotional feelings and connection with family. What I hope to gain from producing an exhibition at the Viewfinder Gallery is an organisation that is supportive of my work. I would like to communicate the importance of my photography to the audience. What I think and feel is always represented in my images strongly whether positive or negative. I am always thinking about my photographic works and there is always a project lined up for me to start even before I’ve finished my current project. This keeps me motivated to continue producing work consistently.
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Steve Perfect steve.perfect@hotmail.co.uk
Landscape of Change My work is an enquiry into place, the experience of being in place and how memories populate the landscape. My practice involves revisiting places and playing out present experience against memories of other times, so memory becomes superimposed on memory in a system of repetition and variation. These interests manifest themselves in a visual fascination with repetition and variation in the geometry of the built environment, the organic forms of vegetation and weathering, and where the two coincide. The places I revisit tend to be what Marc Augé calls non-places, ‘space not defined as relational, historical or concerned with identity’, places where a near absence of context allows traces of sensation and memory that are normally obscured by the activity of daily life to surface in the mind. My work struggles with the practical impossibility of recapturing these traces yet attempts to create space where viewers can become aware of sensations that are the fragmented remains of their own dreams and memories. These photographs were reproduced in my book ‘Terrain Vague’ which was published in 2010.
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Philippa Wilkinson twospoonsmaloy@hotmail.com
My photographs are of insignificant moments, hidden and missed by many are captured here, framing the image and encasing it within the print. Using lo-fi cameras these photographs take on a dreamlike look, producing surreal and unusual results. Being a purely self trained photographer helps me to feel a certain freedom, unrestricted from the 'correct' ways to producing a photograph. I tend to use toy cameras, plastic lenses and film as opposed to digital. I like the consideration devoted to every shot when using film, the preciousness of each decision. I'm interested in everything from the very mundane everyday and framing it to expose its potential beauty, to the extra ordinary landscapes of such places as Iceland. The parallels between the two the strangeness in both. I enjoy also the adventure in taking photographs, the journey from exploration of discovering shots to the unveiling of the outcome.
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Viewfinder Photography Gallery 52 Brixton Village London SW9 8PS www.viewfinder.org.uk