His main interest is the correspondence of the photographic medium and perception. He uses the camera as an extension of the human sight and tries to examine the concept of reality and knowledge. He mostly works in the studio environment and seeks to unfold his ideas in a progressive form.
His works were shown at exhibitions at home and abroad. He won the ON_AWARD grand prize of the OFF_Festival Bratislava Contemporary Photography Festival as a member of a group exhibition in 2014. He won the National Scholarship of Hungary in 2015–2016 and the Association of Hungarian Photographers: Photography Scholarship for 2017. He is a member of the Hungarian Photographers’ Association and Studio of Young Photographers. Biró is represented by Trapéz Gallery, Budapest.
http://www.birodavid.com
Her work retraces her personal family history drawing on her Togolaise heritage, and the idea of origins. The theme of family is explored through self-portraits in which she plays her mother and father, narrating their experience of migration from Togo to Italy. Her images are partially informed by the West African studio portrait tradition.
Zoé Elia Menthonnex, aka Really Bad Picture (b. 1996), is a Swiss and French photographer based in Lausanne. Her work, which oscillates between experimentation and visual narrative, explores the boundaries between the real and the imaginary through projects combining photography, illustration and visual poetry. Among other things, she has developed commissioned work in the world of music, capturing the raw energy of contemporary scenes while pursuing a deeply personal artistic approach.
She graduated from École Supérieure de Photographie de Vevey (CEPV) in 2022, and her work has been exhibited in Switzerland since that year. She took part in PLA(T)FORM at Fotomuseum Winterthur in 2023, as well as in the 2024 edition of the KBCB, as part of a collaboration stemming from the Lumpen Station residency at Fotomuseum. Her work has also attracted international attention: her work was featured in the book Flora Photographica, edited by William A. Ewing and Danaé Panchaud and published by Thames & Hudson in 2022, with her series ZOMBIE.
Through her images, Zoé Elia Menthonnex constructs a hybrid visual language, where the trivial and the sacred, the spontaneous and the reflective, the absurd and the symbolic intersect. Her instinctive approach, driven by a strong sensitivity to materials, textures and atmospheres, makes her work a sensory and emotional experience, always in tension between chaos and contemplation.
Nicola Di Giorgio (b. 1994) graduated in Graphic Design from the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, continuing his studies in Photography at the ISIA in Urbino. With an interdisciplinary approach, his research focuses on the landscape; he investigates contemporary society from scientific, socio-cultural and formal perspectives to identify various correlations between art and science. He combines these methodologies with collecting as an artistic and taxonomic research practice. In 2022, Di Giorgio received the Graziadei Prize for Photography, in co-production with the MAXXI - National Museum of XXI Century Arts in Rome. Since 2023, he has worked as a professor at NABA-New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. His works are found in several public and private collections.
www.nicoladigiorgio.com
@nicoladigiorgio_
Maria Leonardo Cabrita lives and works in Lisbon, where she is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Fine Arts. She holds an MFA in Multimedia Art from the University of Fine Arts, Lisbon; a Diploma in Photography from the Art Academy of Munich; and a BFA/BA in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon. Cabrita’s practice engages a range of subjects, from history and science to other non-artistic practices. She often seeks to question the nature of photography, inverting the relationship between the referent and the referenced, and between what’s seen and what’s perceived. Her current project questions the interconnectivity between optical mirages, images and the act of seeing. Her works have been exhibited throughout Europe and beyond.
My name is Oscar Scott Carl, i’m 26 years old. I finished my bachelor programme in photojournalism in April 2021 at DMJX in Aarhus, Denmark. Photography is for me an exploration of the question why? Through photography I try to understand and comprehend. I believe that my pictures are visual footsteps in my search for understanding of the constant transitions in life. I document transitions to comprehend. I often find myself capturing quiet intimate moments in both human relations and on my own. I do not necessarily feel the need to shout, but I do believe in photography as an important part of understanding the world around us.
Julia Gaes (b. 1993) lives and works in Hamburg. Her work is primarily focused on ideas of body image and identity. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Photography at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld in 2018, and received a Master of Arts in Photography at the HAW Hamburg in 2022. Gaes has exhibited her work at a range of international festivals, including the Triennial of Photography, Hamburg; Kolga Festival, Tbilisi; and Unseen Photo Fair, Amsterdam.
Wbsite: www.juliagaes.de
During Photo London in 2018, They were my landscape (MACK) was launched.
Kiely was nominated for the Paul Huf Award, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award and selected to be in the British Journal of Photography Ones to Watch, Talent issue (2018).
Anna Aicher (b. 1993) is a documentary and portrait photographer from Germany. After studying photography in Berlin, she became a team member at Salzburg’s Gallery Fotohof in 2018. She is currently following a Masterclass at Ostkreuzschule, Berlin. Exploring traces of old traditions and rituals in contemporary society, most of Aicher’s projects have an auto-biographical dimension. She travels constantly between the city and the countryside, turning up stories nestled in distinct communities. Besides her personal projects, Aicher regularly works on assignments for various newspapers and magazines.
Website: www.anna-aicher.com
Characterized by a penchant for sheer entropy and excess, my practice pushes the poetics of chaos to the very limits of the photographic medium. From landscapes and bodies, to human connection, to infrastructure and interior worlds, anything can be sucked into my process and churned back out, transmogrified and transformed through chemical manipulations and surreal photo-collages.
Part travel diary and part love letter to the cities of Tokyo and Osaka, In Bloom is a searing, hyper-visual journey into the heart of Japanese underground culture and an ode to the overwhelming experience of seeing a place with the eyes of a stranger for the first time. The project reads as a frenetic dream sequence, as if the countless nights he spent in the belly of the city have folded into a single never-ending one.
Printing my images onto plastic paper so the ink never quite dries, I then uses water and chemicals to transform the surface of the prints, abstracting and blurring them as if the scenes are melting away.
His practice explores themes of isolation and identity, the juxtaposition of collective and individual, communication versus segregation. By using small narratives he wants to shed light on ways we affect and are affected by artificial social and physical environments.
He has exhibited in The Netherlands and abroad and his work was included in The New Dutch Talent catalogue of 2017 from GUP magazine, and in the Encontros da Imagem 2017 festival program, while his project Point of View was shortlisted for FotoFilmic18.
More: http://www.vassilistriantis.com
Katerina Tsakiri was born in Athens in 1991 and she is based in Gothenburg, Sweden. She studied Photography and Audiovisual Arts in Athens and has an MFA in Photography from the University of Gothenburg. Since 2015 she has been working part-time as a visual artist and part-time as a commercial photographer. From 2019 she has been devoting her time to her artistic practice. She works with self-portraiture and her subjects are mainly autobiographical. The theme of her work is the female identity in Western culture with a focus on the female body. Her practice expands from staged photography to video performances and sculptures. In her latest project, she uses documentary photography to share the journey of her breast cancer treatment. She unravels through the photographic medium her body’s fragility and the impact of the illness on her female identity.
She works in particular on the question of exoticism and on the family, using in her aesthetics the form of photographic documentary-fiction.
This year, she is one of the photographers selected for the 35th edition of the Hyères Fashion, Photography and Fashion Accessories Festival at Villa Noailles.
One often looks at the work of Arnaud De Wolf with a sense of disbelief. Is that image of a gigantic ice cube really floating in mid-air? Is that colourful picture of an ancient forest a realistic depiction or is it a digital fabrication, a fanciful re-creation? What are we meant to discern in his cyanotype prints: random blue lines surrounding white voids of various shapes and sizes or the contours of a mountainous landscape? By means of an unconventional presentation of the photographic image, simply turning it on its side or projecting it into a corner or using outdated techniques, such as the cyanotype, De Wolf presents us with works that hover between the clarity of description and the artificiality of invention. A projected bundle of light suddenly transforms into a three-dimensional object; abstract lines coagulate into a legible form; colours become deceitfully (un)real. In each of his experiments, De Wolf is testing the boundaries of the photographic system, looking for that breaking point where the photograph loses its readability and easy accessibility. His thorough investigation of colour is particularly revealing: Fading forest makes abundantly clear that colour in photography is always artificial. The colours that we see in a photograph are technologically and culturally coded; they are made in the chemist’s lab or produced by a programmer’s algorithm. Colour is here revealed as the manipulative garb in which the photographic skeleton is dressed.
Text by Steven Humblet
Léonie Pondevie's photographic form is composite, arranged by the aggregation of clues: contemporary shots, collected archive images and shared personal documents sit side by side on the wall like evidence of an ongoing investigation into complex and evolving realities. In Un point bleu pâle, Léonie Pondevie contemplates the sky and observes the weather. In the same way that her father would obsessively record rainfall levels and temperatures in small notebooks, she assembles particle images, waiting to be analysed. She subjects these images to a kind of poetic decantation: her father's notebooks and his measurements from another age, archive images of the village where he was born, press cuttings from the 1970s, the clouds in front of us at sea, a hand caressing an antediluvian granite and raindrops on the hood of a relative. The stratospheric and the extremely close, immensity and intimacy, impassive geological time and climatic urgency, it's all there, under the same sky. Placing her observation post at the heart of her family history, Léonie Pondevie eludes the Manichean demonstration: the photographic project, though wide-ranging, does not claim to elucidate anything, but sets itself up as a humble hypothesis. What Un point bleu pâle portrays is the act of human experience; not the thing, the climate, but the ways in which we take it into consideration, from the observer who guesses at its insignificance and modestly records the life of the clouds in little notebooks to the way they are boxed up by geo-engineers, neo-demiurges. From these decanted images, the reflection of a distant land, with which we have lost contact, rises. The simultaneous and paradoxical measure of our insignificance and ourpower to cause harm.
Léonie Pondevie (1996) graduated from the École européenne supérieure d'art de Bretagne in Lorient in 2020. She is a member of the Collectif Nouveau Document and is based in Lorient.