S03-E01

Norma Córdova

00 HeadShot 20220408 01

Growing up as a Catholic Latina, I was very aware of the desirable attributes prescribed to women of my faith, including chastity. At the time, I did not dare to question them out loud. I adhered to them innocently, thinking that this was the way the world operated. In my practice, I photograph women in order to free myself from that conditioning. I explore femininity collaboratively, working with close friends and acquaintances in a full, frank, and free way. In moody, narrative-driven compositions, we explore desire and desirability, and question the myriad expectations of women and how we are portrayed. 


Let It Go

Acacia Johnson

Johnson Headshot

Polaris is a meditation on otherworldly encounters in the Circumpolar Northern landscape. At once an inward and outward exploration, the images reflect my childhood perception of natural world: a realm of wonder, mystery, and sometimes magic.

To me, nature is the source of spiritual well-being, and making
photographs is a way to connect with that source. These images reconstruct a childhood mythology in the boreal Alaskan landscape, where I was raised. The series explores the affinities between Iceland and the Alaskan Arctic; distant regions connected by climate, remoteness, and seismic activity. By traversing the landscape on foot in a receptive state of mind, numinous
experiences reveal themselves. Ice, weather, animals, and celestial phenomena take on significance, and our human scale in geologic time becomes clearer.

These images convey transcendent encounters, each imparting a sense of
wonder in the presence of the unknown. Polaris, the North Star, functions as a metaphor for the presence I feel emanating from these places, the only constant in environments that are otherwise in constant flux.

Polaris

Seif Kousmate

Portrait Seif-1-2

The Dying Soul captures the consequences of climate change and exodus on the Moroccan oases ecosystem. Through intimate documentation, I echo their despair in the face of the environmental and economic hardships that endanger their lands, subsistence, and heritage. Through the power of visual storytelling, I hope to shed light on the rapid deterioration of these ecosystems and contribute to safeguarding efforts, with
the ultimate hope that these efforts will shape environmental and social policy. 

Morocco’s oases have been home to human settlements, agriculture, and important architectural and cultural heritage for centuries, thanks to trans-Saharan trade caravan routes. Today, these oases are home to nearly 2 million inhabitants and contribute to the local and national economic and cultural development. According to official figures, two-thirds of Morocco's 14 million palms have died over the last
century. Climate change bears an economic toll on the oases inhabitants, and endangers their livelihoods. Entire communities have abandoned their lands, migrating to cities with the hopes of a better life.

As a photographer, I asked myself how I can avoid reproducing Orientalist, Eden-like representations of the oasis? How can my work truthfully express the reality of the deterioration that I observed? For this reason, I experiment with new processes and visual narratives to extend the environmental degradation metaphor. The Dying Soul involves external and organic elements (dates, dead skin of palm trees, soil …) that are intimately linked to the spaces I photograph. Hence, contextual layers were progressively and experimentally added to the photos, making the series both documentary and conceptual in scope, taking us back and forth between the reality of the present and the deterioration to come.

The Dying Soul

Elinor Carucci

Elinor by Eran Bendheim 2021

W. Eugene Smith

AIPAD 7-2

Melissa Alcena

Alcena Melissa Headshot

Joni Sternbach

DER GREIF

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Rumi Ando

rumi ando

Greg Miller

Greg Miller profil pic

Sanja Marušić

Sanja Marusic

Matthew Albanese

Shawn Theodore

Elinor Carucci is renowned for sensuous portraits of her family and herself. Closer reveals the breadth of her work, from the erotic to the ethereal, exposing an emotionally honest world flooded with color. Fragments of her life are revealed through family and self-portraits and artful abstractions, making Closer a daring portrayal of the artist's intimate emotional geography.

Carucci's work is first and foremost about the nuclear family, and also touches upon the universality of intimacy and mortality. Her parents, grandparents, and spouse are the central players, each of whom she portrays gently but unflinchingly in her images. Her photographs work with a definite color palette and there is a mesmerizing quality to the serene blues and vivid reds set against the myriad tones of bare skin.

Closer: Photographs by Elinor Carucci is the artist's first monograph. Carucci received the International Center for Photography's Infinity Award for Best Young Photographer in 2001, and earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002.

Closer

After World War II, LIFE magazine assigned staff photographer W. Eugene Smith a human interest story about a doctor in rural America. They sent him to Kremmling, a small and remote town in northern Colorado. His subject: Dr. Ernest Ceriani. 

At first, Smith observed Dr. Ceriani and earned the trust of the townspeople. He wrote: 'I spent four weeks living with him. I made very few pictures at first. ... I simply faded into the wallpaper and waited.' The resulting story spanned 11 pages in LIFE's September 20, 1948 edition.

Smith's intimate series depicts Dr. Ceriani as a heroic yet weary figure who made house calls, delivered babies, and tended to the young and old alike. Through Smith's lens, Ceriani carries the weight of the world on his shoulders as the only doctor within 400 miles. 

A LIFE compendium later summarized 'Country Doctor' as "an instant classic when published, establishing Smith as a master of the commanding young art form of the photo essay, and solidifying his stature as one of the most passionate and influential photojournalists of the 20th century." As TIME magazine explained in its 2016 compendium '100 Photographs: The Most Influential Images of All Time': "By digging so deeply into his assignment, Smith created a singular, starkly intimate glimpse into the life of a remarkable man. It became not only the most influential photo essay in history but the aspirational template for the form.'"

After World War II, LIFE magazine assigned staff photographer W. Eugene Smith a human interest story about a doctor in rural America. They sent him to Kremmling, a small and remote town in northern Colorado. His subject: Dr. Ernest Ceriani. 

At first, Smith observed Dr. Ceriani and earned the trust of the townspeople. He wrote: 'I spent four weeks living with him. I made very few pictures at first. ... I simply faded into the wallpaper and waited.' The resulting story spanned 11 pages in LIFE's September 20, 1948 edition.

Smith's intimate series depicts Dr. Ceriani as a heroic yet weary figure who made house calls, delivered babies, and tended to the young and old alike. Through Smith's lens, he carries the weight of the world on his shoulders as the only doctor within 400 miles. 

A LIFE compendium later summarized 'Country Doctor' as "an instant classic when published, establishing Smith as a master of the commanding young art form of the photo essay, and solidifying his stature as one of the most passionate and influential photojournalists of the 20th century." As TIME magazine explained in its 2016 compendium '100 Photographs: The Most Influential Images of All Time': "By digging so deeply into his assignment, Smith created a singular, starkly intimate glimpse into the life of a remarkable man. It became not only the most influential photo essay in history but the aspirational template for the form.'"

Country Doctor

Melissa Alcena is a Nassau-based Bahamian portrait and documentary photographer. Her work often focuses on shifting the settler-colonial narrative of the Caribbean, and specifically The Bahamas. Alcena flips the script by directly engaging with Bahamians, putting them front and centre, showing them and her country as complex, sophisticated, and diverse. Her strong sense of colour, bright light, and deep shadow are  purely homegrown, yet unexpected and nuanced. Reaching past surface appearances framed by the colonial gaze, Alcena reveals the true nature of her sitters and the nation.

People of the Sun

Her Wave reflects Joni Sternbach's travel to worldwide surf spots over the past fourteen years. Facing weather and tide, Sternbach and her subject intersect at the periphery of two powerful elements: land and sea. Sternbach allows the format's rawness and immediacy to shape each composition's distinctive appearance, echoing important traditions of nineteenth-century anthropological photography.



Her Wave comprises portraits of female wave riders captured over the last fourteen years on beaches around the globe. These unique objects are created with a variety of large format cameras using the wet plate collodion technique, an antique process that must be prepared and developed on location. 

Wet plate photography is elaborate, part theater and part craft, and my process takes place in the public eye. It draws spectators and entices new participants. At each location, the dark box and chemicals are set up before the plate is sensitized and the  picture is composed. Once the subject is in place, the plate is coated with collodion and plunged into a silver nitrate bath. The sensitized plate is then placed into the camera back and brought to the sitter for exposure. Exposure times vary, but in the digital age, my exposures are comparatively very slow.  Once the picture is made, the plate is brought back to the dark box for development, rinsing, and fixing in bright daylight, often with spectators standing by.

Her Wave has taken me to some of the world's most celebrated surfing beaches. I have come to expect chance meetings and random occurrences at each location. Facing weather and tide, my subjects and I intersect at the periphery of two powerful elements: land and sea. Photographing surfers using the wet collodion process suits my subject matter. I allow the format's rawness and immediacy to shape each composition's distinctive appearance, echoing important traditions of nineteenth-century anthropological photography.


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