Simon Dent - The Journey

My interest lies in the creation of a continuous narrative through landscape, that jumps through time and space, that allows digression and return. The scenes that interest me are of arrival, portals, paths, obstacles, steps, doorways, bridges, reflections, hiding places and departures. Different sequences of images can create a narrative following paths along coasts, down roads and through forests. I am interested in Shan-Shui traditional paintings that depict landscapes where the elements take on a symbolic relevance in a visual story that describes a journey from beginning to end.

Traditional hand-held painted scrolls of journeys through landscapes are a format that resonates with my way of working. The earliest images are from 1984 - from before my art school training. In 2010 I picked up this thread again because I realized that it was a way of perceiving the world that was meaningful to me. The place and date of each image is only important as it is the spatial and temporal location during my time. The chronology is not important, but I like discovering connectors between images that were taken decades apart. There is always an autobiographical element in every choice, from choosing the scene to cropping, editing and processing. However, there is no autobiographical intention. I am interested in the lyrical aspects of individual landscape scenes, but more than that, how these scenes can interact together to make narratives. This sequence is of natural landscapes.

Berat Nalci - Marseille, City of the Sun

Berat on IG

Berat’s website

Vasily Pindyurin - Patina

“I grew up in Soviet Russia. My peers and I had Soviet cartoons, cinema, football, skates, bicycles, but what we really wanted were games consoles and video recorders. Then the country in which I was born stopped existing. The space of the Soviet deficit was now replaced with the abundance of the capitalist world. The culture of East and West was seeping through, along with Snickers chocolate bars and Chinese Adidas fakes. Now, about 30 years later, video recorders and games consoles are packed into the smartphone. But I go to the shop and buy “Soviet” things. I dig them at flea markets, seek them inside the houses and in the garages of my friends. On the photographs, in the hands of young people – those who even did not live in the Soviet Union – these things turn into paradoxical objects. The objects that promise a brighter future that will never arrive.”

Florian Wendler - Menhir

Words by photographer Florian Wendler

The process of removing a stone from its place of origin and relocating it to another area can be traced back to the earliest days of mankind. It may mark the beginning of plastic art and a first stubborn rebellion against a world that is hard and rough, indifferent and inaccessible like the the stone itself. It is not without reason that people turned against the stones with their resigned energies. They are the terrible other; an entire being without difference, without separation, a being, just like that, without any purpose. As such, it counteracts human freedom, which only begins precisely where life breaks down into a self and the world. Maybe the stone mirrors most clearly a longing for the dissolution of the fixed boundaries of the ego, for the loss of self, which is repressed into the unconscious. Survival in this sense means first and foremost self-preservation. Man repeats his own destiny with the stones: he wrests them away from their origin, breathes spirit into them, and gives them meaning.

By erecting the stones, an omniscient and ordering spirit that stands above all natural events becomes proverbially manifest. They are more than mere material, they are carriers of this strange and mysterious power, of a magic on which one's own life depends and in which it participates. With growing technical-rational control over the earth and its inhabitants, the human spirit increasingly recognized itself as this foreign power, and replaced magic with calculus. The stones that we encounter in the pictures are, if at all, perhaps still carriers of a profane prohibition. As a barrier they merely serve to prevent certain actions and as such escape our instrumental interest. The pictures of 'Menhir' are an attempt to revive the stones, to establish contact, start another dialogue about the reasons for the emergence of our modern culture and, finally, to revive ourselves.

Florian on Instagram

Ruby Burgess - To Who I Am

Ruby Burgess’ To Who I Am is a personal photography project which visualizes a series of poems she has written over the past years. Her images, with an intimate and softened focus, depict the various emotions and experiences we go through in our lives. These emotions are brought to life through her lens as each scene acts as a kaleidoscope of her fragmented memories. As Burgess’ looks outward to visualize her experience, viewers are able to look inside of the photographer and observe the moments that have made her into who she is today.

- Alexa Fahlman

Ruby’s website

Ruby on Instagram