With a mindful approach she seeks stillness and hidden messages in ordinary life, often exploring society, human-made landscape and nature.
She very often travels to remote places, far away from the big cities, where she is able to find more simpler ways of existence.The subjects she photographs are often isolated with little context around them. While this visual isolation is the way Juliette presents herself to the world, she also craves human connection. A direct confrontation with the camera is a way for her to connect with the subjects she photographs and through them with the rest of the world.
In a few words, her practice in documentary photography is a search of self-knowledge and an attempt to reencounter the essence of a life without noise.
What does reality look like when it is photographed from its own perimeter, in the uncanny zone between certainty, objectivity and dreams, where an idealised version of the world has infiltrated? Sébastien Cuvelier’s photography may well provide the answer.
In his images, what is real always seems larger than it actually is. The photographs appear to have passed through a fantasy filter, to be projected from a dimension where other rules apply. The sensation is similar to the one felt in the twilight zone between wakefulness and sleep, when ambiguous landscapes are crossed in what is not quite a dream.
It is not unusual to feel a little uncomfortable when looking at his photographs. To have the sense that one is intruding on someone else’s secret, imaginary territory. Perhaps it’s because the people, places and objects are made unfamiliar by certain details, yet seem a part of daily life. A superficial mundanity, one filled with residential blocks, interiors decorated with ostentatious luxury, ordinary streets and gardens. And yet, our usual references are rendered obsolete.
The colours, the blurring, the inconsistencies: everything conspires to make us doubt that these photographs portray what really exists. Sébastien Cuvelier appears to have found the way to an observation room that provides a mysterious and disturbing view of the human desire to become a utopian incarnation of itself.
- Text by Philippe Marczewski (.TIFF)
Benedek Bognár (1986) lives and works in Budapest. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in photography from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. In 2012 he studied performance and video art at the Estonian Academy of Art in Tallinn on an Erasmus scholarship. His series of works address issues related to current social phenomena, aiming to create unusual or new perspectives. He is primarily concerned with the symptoms of virtuality, digitalization, and the age of image-based communication. In his work, he often reflects on photography itself as a medium capable of creating the illusion of an objective representation of the world and its role in the process of human cognition. In his recent work, he has been concerned with modern myths and the general human need for irrational stories to explain the world. In his thesis, Genesis, he examined how the entertainment and advertising industries use the patterns, archetypes, and topoi from which humanity’s ancient great myths were built, from the perspective of the functioning of consumer society. In his work CUI PRODEST, which he is working on under the József Pécsi Photography Scholarship, he deals with the pseudo-news and disinformation of the world, which are based on irrational contexts and enemy images instead of scientific paradigms.
Angelina Vernetti (* 1993 in Lüneburg, DE) lives and works as a freelance photographer in Berlin. Her focus is on portraiture, fashion and art. She works e.g. in editorial for magazines like Der SPIEGEL and GEO Magazine, photographs commissioned art for architectural firms or teaches fashion photography at the Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle. For documentary long term projects Angelina researches and photographs socially relevant but underrepresented topics.
For example, her works tell of the socio-cultural effects of the birth control pill (SMILE EFFEKT, 2020) and of beauty ideals and their consequences (EVERY BODY, 2022). In 2020 she graduated with a bachelor's degree in documentary photography at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hannover.
“Nuno Serrão is a Portuguese photographer, interested in the dialogues between science and contemporary art. Each of his images considers how information is handled, shared, and perceived, framing scenarios as micro-narratives, demonstrating a sensitivity and a curiosity for the planet and its inhabitants. (…)”
Kate Simpson, Aesthetica Magazine, 2019
“(…) His cinematic compositions and unorthodox approach to portraiture demonstrate a sensitivity to the world around him. (…)”
gelstaten, 2021
“(…) Each photograph he creates holds an intense air of mystery, a fog that is wrapped in the never-ending eerie. (…)”
Christina Nafziger, Create! Magazine, 2021
“(…) They depict deserted landscapes being at times overtaken by imposing brutalist architecture, translating a form of melancholy through its aesthetic simplicity. The cinematic compositions, deprived of human life, show places of passage and transition where time seems to stand still for a relieving moment of quietness before a choreography of movements resumes. (…)”
Claire Ducresson-Boët, Fotogalerie Friedrichshain, 2022
Hi, I’m a Portuguese photographer and filmmaker born on Madeira Island. My blank slate starts with a functional level of emotion, logic, minimalism, and curiosity; I consider them the building blocks of my creative process.Led by curiosity, I often document ambiguous but frameable narratives that, in the end, pose a new set of questions, like the one from my current research topic: We are living in the age of multi-tabs, binge-watching, and immediatism. Travelling and arriving faster than ever, we no longer have the time to understand what we are slowly losing. If all trips are made on comfortable shortcuts, what will happen to the question posed out of discomfort?
With the sum of all relatable questions, I think I’ll get an answer.
Kwabena Sekyi Appiah-nti (b. 1994) is a Belgian-Ghanaian photographer based in Amsterdam. Straddling the boundaries of documentary and fashion photography, his projects reveal a fascination for people who face societal prejudice, aspiring to cut through the clichés of stereotyped representation. Delving into his subjects’ worlds and observing their behaviours, Appiah-Nti documents their true essence; he describes ‘boyhood’ as the overarching theme in his work.
Irene Fenara (b.1990) is an Italian artist. Her research focuses on the way of seeing and practicing observation on images. She reflects on linguistic devices and she use optical and electronic instruments of various kinds, from Polaroid to surveillance cameras, often in an improper manner and transgressing their basic function. It becomes an instrument for observing the world, in the search for a slight poetic sense. The act of vision is the central element of her work that declines in her latest research on optical devices, often used as instruments of control, bringing attention to the always reversible overturning between who observes and who is observed. Her work has been exhibited in art galleries and public institutions, such as Fondazione Prada Osservatorio (2016), Fondazione Fotografia Modena (2017), P420 (2017), MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna (2018), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (2018), Fondazione Francesco Fabbri (2018) e Kunst Merano Arte (2019). She is one of the fifth finalists in ING Unseen Talent Award 2019.
https://www.irenefenara.com/
The perfect skin and the smooth image which accompanies it, Eva O’Leary knows all too well the different ingredients and recipes of commercial photography. She too, as a teen, ate this cake which now, as an artist, she presents to us on a plateau. In a refrigerator rests a sponge cake, accompanied with printed icing: a saccharine young woman with perfect blow-dried hair watches us. Since it is said that revenge is a dish best served cold, this is the fate which the photographer reserves for the young blonde haired woman with the Colgate smile and her diktat. She grew up in the United States of America in a campus town whose name is almost an order – Happy Valley – and remembers her years spent masking her Irish head in the hood of a must have Abercrombie sweatshirt. The series, Happy Valley, is rooted in her town and her adolescent memories, describing an environment which is intrusive and worrying, modelling individuals whose self identity has been traded for a generic body. With the more recent Spitting Image, it is the years before, the adolescent vulnerability which are exposed. Young girls, around fifteen years old, present themselves to us, tightly framed on a vibrant blue backdrop which permits neither an escape for the gaze, nor breathing room for the model. Eva O’Leary accompanies these photographs with videos: perched upon a stool, we watch them searching for the person they hoped to find in the mirror. In this interval the photographer reopens the field of representations and with it, the freedom to be complex, different, uncertain, unique, human.
Max is a documentary and portrait photographer who focuses on stories about society, social and ecological chances. He is a founding member of DOCKS collective.
In 2015 she graduated in Cultural Studies from the Higher School of Economics (Moscow) and in 2019 she completed the course Experiences of Contemporary Photography at Docdocdoc School of Contemporary Photography (St. Petersburg). Exhibitions include: In the N apartment, all tricks are taken seriously, ZGA Gallery, St. Petersburg (2019); MoS Photo Prize, Art of Omsk City Museum (2019); Young Artists That Oksana Budulak and Sanya Zakirov Liked This Winter, Ploshchad Mira Museum Center, Krasnoyarsk (2020); and Young Photographers of Russia 2020, Innovative Cultural Center, Kaluga; Exhibition Hall, Tula (2020), Assuming the Distance: Speculations, Fakes and Predictions in the Age of the Coronacene (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow). She is a winner of The Calvert Journal Makers of Siberia Special Jury Prize (2019), the New East Photo Prize (2020), and the competition Krakow Show OFF at Photography Month in Krakow (2021). She lives and works in Moscow.
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.
Riccardo Svelto (Florence, 1989) is currently based in Florence, where he works as a professor and freelance photographer. Svelto is graduated from the BA Photography at LABA (Libera Accademia di Belle Arti) in Florence (2015).
He has been the winner of the FOLIO International Online Photobook Masterclass (2020) by PhMuseum & Witty Books. In 2021, Witty Books published his first photobook entitled La Cattedrale. His work has been selected for Giovane Fotografia Italiana GFI 2022, exhibition in Fotografia Europea Festival 2022. At the same time, his work is featured in printed and online publications like Ignant, i-D, Booooooom, VOSTOK magazine and others.
His work is mainly focused on the relationship between empathy and social dynamics, trying to understand the emotional interaction and mind shapes we all face at the different ages and circumstances of life.
Daniel Chatard (*1996) is a Franco-German documentary photographer working on long-term projects related to the topics of environment, climate change and power structures. He is interested in how these issues manifest themselves in the physical space. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in photojournalism and documentary photography at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hanover in 2021. Since 2018 he has been freelancing for ZEIT and National Geographic among others. 2018 he did an exchange semester in Journalism and Photojournalism at the Tomsk State University in Russia. Since 2021 Daniel is doing his master’s degree in Photography and Society at the Royal Academy of Arts The Hague. Coming from a background of photojournalism, he established for his practice the term of the “involved documentary”, indicating that he acknowledges the relationships between himself and the subjects he tries to understand through a visual approach, instead of assuming the position of an outside observer. This means that the process of exposing himself to the issues he researches on is a crucial part of his practice.
Lorenzo uses the photography as a way of expression; he refines his technique during a long collaboration in the backstages for several fashion brands, a collaboration that still exists.
The skills acquired will allow Lorenzo to express himself creatively.
Through the use of a camera he captures images that evoke emotions and thoughts; he is not a lover of photographic manipulation through programs, in fact he creates installations to recreate what he thought and felt while visiting those places.
Since starting to work in photography in 2009 Shlyk has had solo exhibitions in Belarus (Museum of Modern Fine Art, Minsk), Russia (Russian Museum of Decorative and Applied Art, Moscow and Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art, Saint-Petersburg), Belgium (Extra City, Antwerp), China (Duloun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai) and participated in several international photo festivals (Breda Photo 2016 in Netherlands, Format 2017 in Derby, Belfast Photo Festival the UK, Photo Phnom Penh 2018). Since 2016 he is collaborating on multiple projects with Ben Van den Berghe. In 2017 his work was shortlisted for Prix Levallois, Shlyk became a laureate of Carte Blanche at Paris Photo and won ArtContest (Belgium). In 2018 he won Prijs Roger De Conynck and became the Public Prize Winner of ING Unseen Talent Award.
In 2016 she published her first photo book, eden, thanks to the Fiebre Dummy Award. Since 2010 she lives in Madrid, alternating her work as a photographer with her personal projects.
In his personal projects he focuses on the creation and cohesion of communities and the human relationship with the environment. He follows his stories for longer periods, looking for the dynamics of change. Besides several awards at the Hungarian Press Photo Contest, he was awarded 3rd place at Pictures of the Year international – Feature Picture Story category. Between 2015 and 2017 he received the Pécsi József Photography Scholarship.
http://martonkallai.com/
Ligia Popławska (b. 1994, Poland) is a visual artist currently based in Antwerp, Belgium. Her work explores themes of senses, emotional states and human impact on environment. With a deep interest in natural phenomena, art history and sciences, her researchbased, speculative work focuses of human and morethan- human in the changing conditions of the (Post) Anthropocene. She graduated with honours from the Photography department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (BA and MA), previously gaining a BA in Art History from the University of Gdańsk (2016). Her project ‘Fading Senses’ won Decade of Change Series Award (2022) by the British Journal of Photography, as well as a solo exhibition at PhMuseum Days International Photography Festival in Bologna, Italy (2021) and Photography Prize funded by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (2020). Ligia Popławska is a laureate of .tiff 2022 (FOMU Antwerp) and a recipient of a scholarship for Emerging Talents from the Flemish Government. She exhibited at Bienal’23 Fotografia do Porto, FOMU Antwerp, De Brakke Grond, Helsinki Photo Festival, among others. Ligia Popławska works as a freelance photographer and editor.
www.ligiapoplawska.com
Rita Puig-Serra Costa is a Barcelona-based photographer. With a background in Humanities and an MA in Comparative Literature, she later studied Graphic Design and Photography. Today, Costa works on personal projects alongside various commercial assignments. Her first project, Where Mimosa Bloom, was published by Editions du Lic in 2014. Her ongoing Anatomy of an Oyster project will launch in 2023. Closely related to literature, Costa’s work revolves around the concept of identity. Her investigations also explore the essence of human relationships, and the influence that love, death, luck or memories have on the construction of ourselves.
Elise Dervichian and Lina Wielant are two Belgian artist-photographers based in Brussels. They have a history of collaborating but launched a new project together in 2020. Studying at ESA le 75 from 2015 to 2018, Elise Dervichian deepened herself into the reportage style. Towards the end of her studies, she worked as an assistant curator at La cité des Arts in Saint Denis, Réunion Island. Her work is focused on documentary photography, working on societal subjects such as rape culture or the Armenian diaspora in Belgium. Lina Wielant graduated from Sint Lukas Hogeschool Brussel, where she primarily focused on analogue darkroom techniques, with a predilection for editing photo-books. In August 2022 she participated in a residency at DecorAtelier, (Brussels) with the organisation Dis Mon Nom, which aims to shed light on invisibilised people. Together, Elise Dervichian and Lina Wielant combine analogue and digital photography, mainly through staged self-portraits and photo-montages.
Martina Dendi (Livorno, 1994) lives and works in Milan. She graduated in photography at the Libera Accademia di Belle Arti (LABA) in Florence and, in 2017, she attended the Stephen F. Austin State University (SFASU) in Texas. In 2018, Dendi attended the course of New Technologies at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, where she graduated in 2021 with a specialization in Photography. In 2019, she studied for a semester at Moholy-Nagy Művészeti Egyetem, in Budapest.
In 2017, Dendi publishes her first photo book Caducità who has been also exhibited as solo show at the Tethys Gallery in Florence, and as part of a group show at Seipersei gallery in Siena. She exhibits the photographic project Assenza at the Stephen F. Austin State University (SFASU) in Texas. In 2020 she exhibits Hungarian Style at CAREOF (Milan). In 2021 her work has been selected among the finalists of the Combat Award 2021.
Her works start from an anthropological approach of interest on grotesque and ironic side of life. She is often actress and subject of her images, exploring the therapeutic process of self-definition and awareness of her presence in the world.
martinadendi21@hotmail.it https://edu.myphotoportal.com/dendi/