Visual Culture for the digital age
Jingchao Su was born in Fuzhou, China, and currently lives in Xiamen. His photography focuses on social scenes with signs of overwhelm, trying to cut into the depths of daily life, and depict an underlying chaotic natural state or ambiguously symbolic picture.
Read MoreIn The Ancient Ways, Ted Homer records the ancient paths of The Salt Way, Welsh Way and White Way, over one winter as they cross the Cotswolds.
Read MoreGabriela Ureta is an Ecuadorian documentary photographer currently living in London, but soon due to return home to Ecuador. Her initial interest in documentary photography stemmed from its unique method of storying the individual moments that define a person’s life. Here, her series The Waltzes of Don Claudio is indicative of her emphatic approach.
Read MoreOrsolya Luca’s series 12 months documents her personal perception of our current state of living during the pandemic. The 30 images below are a broad selection from thousands of images she took in the past 12 months. This selection’s muddled aesthetics juxtaposes our human responses–of masks and social distancing–to unaffected architecture and natural landscapes.
Read MoreKanrapee Chokpaiboon’s The Good Place observes Varanasi, one of India’s Holy cities.
Read MoreA selection of photographs by Irish photographer John Paul Quigley.
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Spanning over a decade of photos, Normal for Norfolk begins at the photographer’s final visit to his family’s holiday home in the Norfolk village of Snettisham, aged Fourteen. The series depicts subsequent visits to the surrounding towns and villages on the North Norfolk coast that the photographer frequented as a child. The series takes its title form the derogatory phrase used to exemplify the historically perceived strangeness and backwardness of the county.
The project began as an observation of the English coast, documenting the quirks, charms and contradictions of the seaside tourist destinations that once boomed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, now since in decline. This social documentary approach is fused with a biographical narrative, presenting the photographer’s long and changing relationship with the region and the people he associates with the area. Family excursions, drunken teenage weekend and professional trips capture the nostalgic rush of returning to the stages on which childhood is played out. Pastel paints are sun-faded, neon signs don’t burn as bright and the helter-skelter seems smaller than it used to.
Johann Kööp is a visual artist from Estonia, currently living and working in London. Kööp works most prominently with photography, reflecting on collective and individual experiences with communication in the contemporary world. His work is informed most notably through personal encounters and observations, which progresses into a playful clash of subjectivity and objectivity. Through Kööp’s eyes, we see a world of abstractions and surreal indefinable emotions, grounded to a realm of comprehension by acknowledging commonly accepted beliefs around society.
Phantoms Among Imaginations uses the empty apartment space as a representation of the mind, hosting scenes of raw imagination, unbothered by rational thought. In this imagined space, the thought of emptiness appears most unsettling. While we let these spaces challenge our imaginations, they propose an undefinable number of options and opportunities. The mere multiplicity of the situation is destined to make one overwhelmed with the potential of that empty space, fearful of a state of heightened entropy. What results is a kind of dangerous emptiness, one that feels indefinable, and eventually reveals itself as the opposite. We feel the space between the decisions, an uncertainty which makes it unable to get a hold of a choice that feels right.
Kööp’s scenes often take form through the appropriation and redefinition of materials relating to home and the urban spaces. Through its strong colours and manipulated reality, the work delves into possible mental complications and distortions of the self, highlighting anxious reactions to everyday life. In its final form, the work returns to the intensity that had once inspired it, becoming reflections of the self which might have been otherwise overlooked. Through this, Phantoms Among Imaginations also brings out the multiplicity of the self, exploring the endless variety of different characters that we might not even realise exist.
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- words by Johann Kööp ed. by Alexa Fahlman
Photographed with a long exposure, the landscape appears bright, as if in daytime, but the bright city lights, stars and moon indicate the night. This fictional mixture of day and night mirrors Jack Marber Worsley’s imagined world activated by night, an intoxicating solace in nature.
Read MoreCombining travel photographs with computer-generated images modelled after iconic mid-century modern designs, Journey Gong’s series predicts a forthcoming eco-consciousness.
Read MoreNairobi-based photographer Bryan Otieno Opany’s Dagoretti Corner is inspired by the day-to-day life that takes place within this Kenyan corner. H
Read MoreKenneth Lam is a London-based photographer whose work stems from a highly personal, autobiographical perspective. His meticulous photographs and reflective prose honour the beauty and rituals of Chinese culture. Photography, for Lam, is a communicative practice which allows him to visualize the stories he wishes to tell. Where words may lack, photography does the speaking. We talk with Lam about his previously unreleased story The End of an Era. Keep reading below for a portal into Shan Pui Tsuen village as experienced by Kenneth Lam during a humid Hong Kong summer in 2020.
Read MorePierre Folk captures oddly reminiscent vestiges of Europe’sIndustrial Revolution.
Read MoreChloe Nicholls’ ongoing work ‘Mother Moon’ plays with the idea of myth to examine the proclivity of the mind towards magic, and its intangible relationship to the camera.
Read MoreA selection of images by Manchester-based photographer Jack Roe. His most recent series This Land of Mine looks at a small village called Aldford situated on the outskirts of Chester, England.
Read MoreHeads by Tristan Martinez is a visual study of trivial interactions we encounter in our day to day life.
Read MoreThis time last year, photographer Svetlana Mladenovic was fulfilling her childhood dream of wandering around Japan. However, since then, the world has collapsed into a stasis, and amid these strange days life stands still and Mladenovic finds herself caught in transitory moments of reality and dream.
Read MoreIn Search of Lost Time is a series about time and our impact on nature. It is a collaboration between polish photographer Zuzanna Szarek and Icelandic writer and activist Andri Snær Magnason.
Read MoreKir Lykkeberg and Mathias Teko Foley explore Mathia’s identity as half Danish, half Togolese, and born with albinism, through their photographic series Constructed Memories .
Read MoreTristan Chevillard’s Sans Soleil gives viewers a glimpse into Lapland’s shortest day in the year.
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