“In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.” – Alice Walker When Alicja Brodowicz chooses Alice Walker’s words as the epithet to her series Visual Exercises, she evokes the basic truth of the project: nature is a strange […]
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Francois Bellabas’ photographic series Motorstudies is an ambitious mix between documentary photography and a search for idealized aesthetics. Described by Bellabas himself, the series “is a photographic study that questions the car and its representation, but which also uses it as a referent and a measurement tool. It’s a documentary about the issues, the challenges and the […]
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A grandparent’s house is a treasured haven. It is a domain removed from the drama of the childhood home, but still intimately familial. For the lucky ones, the grandfamily can be a constant second port of call, one step removed from the web of responsibilities and expectations owed amongst immediate kin. We enter Grandfather’s House near the […]
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It is a dark lecture hall at the back of the bottom floor of the National Gallery of Canada, next to the gift shop and an atrium lit by the koi pond, which serves as its skylight. The hall is full of murmurs and silhouettes. They move with a light anticipation, and the conversations I […]
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Stepan Chubaev’s work is anything but classic portraiture. Rather than capturing his subjects in a soft and flattering light, he presents their features boldly and bizarrely, often with highly saturated colours and overexposed light. Chubaev hails from the cultural capital of Russia, Saint Petersburg. Born in 1999, Chubaev has made some impressive feats as an […]
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Casey Meyers’s series “I’m Feeling a Little Strange” is about homecoming, but there is little at-homeness to the spirit of the series. Instead, the art discusses life and identity as they lapse into mute simulacra, reflections that appear as lived experience but are not quite ‘real’ in the sense of actual presence. The crisis of […]
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In the wake of a terminated nuclear deal and a nation left demonized once more—we find an appropriate home for Leonardo Magrelli’s endeavor to photograph Iran “under a different, detached and less propagandistic light.” Traditional photographic projects undertaken by the West are often concerned with the extravagant architecture of mosques and palaces—sites ripe for the […]
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In the 21st century, two major interrelated technological factors have greatly changed how we take photos and how we engage with photography. The first major change was the advent of increasingly affordable digital technology allowing more photos to be taken more often by more people, and cheaper than ever before. I should also mention digital editing technology, which changed the level of control a photographer could exercise over a photo once it is taken. However, this improvement is overstated by those unfamiliar with analog editing technology. It is more an improvement in access than in capacity.
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Aesthetics, like language, have outgrown their original primary role as a mediator of subjectivity and instead have become subjectivity itself. Rather than lived experience dictating aesthetics, aesthetics now dictate lived experiences. Our current state of contemporary photography can sometimes feel like every potentiality has been tried, and sometimes the best inspiration comes from digging through […]
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Sam Rupsa lets the ordinary be ordinary, and there’s something so strange about it. In all of Rupsa’s photographs, there shines anticlimax, redundancy, thwarted fantasy, mock sublime, and desaturated nostalgia. From southern California and currently based in Denver, CO, Rupsa’s mixture of tropical nights, suburban ennui, and western gothic seems eclectic, but his wry, sardonic […]
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