Her practice often deals with elusive subject matters; a search for the unknown, a psychological state, the act of communication and interpretation. She is interested in creating a loose, expressive form of documentation that leaves room for subjective interpretations, embracing the suggestive and metaphorical potential of photographs.
She gained her BA (Hons) in Photography at the University of Brighton, and has recently completed her MA in Photography at the University of West England.
She was one of the recipients of the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward award 2017, selected as a Commended winner of the Genesis Imaging Postgraduate Award 2018, shortlisted for the Brighton Photo Fringe Open Solo 18, awarded third prize in the British Journal of Photography’s International Photography Award 2019, shortlisted for the Images Vevey Book Award, and most recently selected as one of the Jury’s Choice in the Prix Virginia 2020. Her work has been exhibited nationally & internationally, including as a solo presentation at Format Festival 2019 as part of their thematic Forever/Now, at Pingyao International Photography Festival, China, in Profound Movement group exhibit at Houston Centre for Photography, and most recently as a solo exhibit at Landskrona Foto 2020.
Having worked for several years in various media as a photojournalist, he made the decision to turn in their work and personal lives mainly developing projects of human and environmental fields.
He is currently also as a photo guide in Iceland, Greenland, Faroe Islands, Norway and Ukraine.
"Porosity is probably the concept that best characterises Etienne Courtois’s approach to his photographic work. One of the threads in his creative process is his distinctly plastic treatment of the medium through integrated and often barely noticeable interventions that are both sculptural and pictorial by nature. These interventions are evident in how he prepares his support as well as in the compositions themselves.
The interventions often originate from the confrontation between various random objects gathered by Courtois during his walks and rambles through the city or in nature, leading to surprising encounters that have a contemporary surrealistic quality, which is further accentuated by the treatment or plastic and pictorial transformations he applies. Courtois adds a subsequent layer of ambiguity to the reading of this process by creating sculptural forms - often in plaster, but also in wood - that are integrated into the images or applied in relief on the prints.
Occasionally, the ambivalence of the treatment is emphasised by multiple exposure of the same photographic negative, which modifies the chromatic values as well as the shapes in the initial image, creating the effect of a shift or spectral motion.
The work of Etienne Courtois clearly surpasses the dichotomy between figurative and representational art. The ambiguity in interpreting and understanding these interventions leads to completely new and surprising formal encounters between everyday objects in a whimsical, alienating atmosphere. Courtois’s work is marked by a distinctly free, singular and often witty approach that evokes the pictorial work of Walter Swennen or the sculptures of Koenraad Dedobbeleer."
Text by Emmanuel Lambion
“Can a cardboard disc be mistaken for the moon? Could a streak of paint be perceived as a beam of light?” In her series Light of Other Days, Ann Vincent experiments, fails, plays around and messes with our perception of reality. We are confronted with familiar scenes that we often fail to notice: a puddle of water, a sunbeam on the pavement… In Light of Other Days, Ann Vincent sets out to recreate these fleeting moments in her studio and capture them in photographs. The appearance of a rock in the sand is replicated using industrial chemical components. Each image is painstakingly produced, the result of a tireless pursuit of the right materials, lighting conditions and framing. The process is chaotic but the final image seemingly perfect. Bringing the work to the exhibition space, Vincent continues her game: she cleverly places the photographs in unexpected corners, behind a staircase or floating in front of a window. The photographs become sculptural and encourage the viewer to move around and discover what lies beyond the image.
Ann Vincent plays a trick on us, and in doing so, touches upon one of photography’s most fundamental properties: its disturbing relationship with reality. This body of work is an illusion, disclosing its poetic magic only to the attentive viewer.
www.annvincent.be
Erola Arcalís (Menorca, 1986) graduated from MA Photography at the Royal College of Art (2017) and is currently based in London. Recent exhibitions include: Rehearsing the Real, Peckham24, London, May 2019; Paisajes Esenciales, JustLX, Lisbon, May 2019; A Corner With Erola Arcalís, solo, A Corner With, London, May 2018.
Arcalís uses the lyricism of the black and white photograph to create fictional narratives that navigate between the stage and the encountered. Her practice combines abstract landscapes and sculptural still life to generate different voices. Arcalís’ images are inspired or make use of poetic text to construct fictions that revolve around myth, dream and personal experience. Central to her process is the materiality of the large format analogue print and the slowness of the 5x4 camera.
Lia Darjes was born in Berlin in 1984 and grew up in Hamburg. She studied with Ute Mahler at HAW in Hamburg and then as a master class student with Ute Mahler and Ingo Taubhorn at Ostkreuzschule in Berlin, where she started teaching in 2018. Her work has been exhibited in Germany, France, Canada, Russia and Switzerland and published in national and international media such as M, le Monde, and CNN. She has received various scholarships and awards, including the young talent award of the Art Prize of the Lotto Foundation Brandenburg.
Her work 'Tempora Morte' is an authentic documentary still-life study from the unofficial roadside-market of Russia's little exclave Kaliningrad.
Her artistic practice is developed under the motto No one left behind. It consists of the production of photo-objects and working with marginal/hidden objects and photographs, together with research materials transformed into photo-video installations reflecting the life of unknown people.
Cristina participated in over 35 exhibitions in Romania and abroad, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Portugal, and Hungary. Cristina's recent projects focus on interpreting memory objects and integrating photographic material into contemporary spaces through visual installations. Notable displays include her contribution to Fragmentum at Palatele Brâncovenești and Here they lived at Carol 53 and the International Visual Art Biennale Brașov (2021, 2023).
Cristina has published studies in Anthropology of East Europe Review, Indiana University; History of Communism in Europe, IICCMER; Studies and History Articles, Romanian Society of Historical Sciences; Romanian Contemporary Photography Influx; Revelar, Universidade do Porto. She is also the author of "Photographic collections and archives today, in the digital world," published by Tritonic.
Sensitive to the cracks that our society is going through, her work focus on social issues and human bodies as territories. Celine uses film codes to transgress the world she’s looking at.
Her various works as a photographer and video artist were presented at the Billboard Festival in Casablanca (2015), the Marrakech Biennale in 2016, the Paraguay Biennale (El ojo Salvaje - 2018), the Tangier Photography Foundation (2019), the Dummy Award Photobook of Kassel and the Fuam Dummy Book Award from Istanbul in 2018.
In 2019, she is the winner of the In Cadaqués Festival with « SQEVNV », and the Revelation Price between Festival Map and Face à la mer.
In 2020, she is selected among 100 emerging European photographers by Gup magazine and Fresh Eyes Photo Talent 2020 (book published in July 2020) and she’s the winner of the Prix Mentor 2020 with « Mala Madre ».
In 2021, she’s one of the finalist of the HSBC prize 2021 with « SQEVNV » and will exhibited it in April at the Festival Instantes in Portugal.
Her work 'Nothing Hapenned' will be exposed in April 2021 at the Rencontres de la jeune photographie internationale de Niort (Villa Perochon). She’s also have been selected by Claudio Composti for the Leica Oscar Barnack, and she’s one of the laureate of the Tremplin Jeunes Talents of the Festival Planches Contact in Deauville 2021.
Noémi Napsugár Melegh was born in 1990 in Budapest, Hungary, and is currently a full-time photojournalist for telex.hu, one of the largest independent news portals in Hungary. Although she has been interested in photography since she was in high school, she worked as a health economist for several years after having obtained her BA and MSc in Economics. During the past two years, she has participated in several international training courses: she was a fellow of the VII Academy Level 1 and Level 2 Documentary Photography Seminar, a participant of the Magnum workshop organised by the Robert Capa Center in Budapest, and a fellow of the Canon Student Development programme and of the prestigious Eddie Adams workshop in Jeffersonville, New York. Her true passion lies in creating long-form documentary projects that focus on personal stories and presenting the lives of local, marginalised communities. In 2023, she won 2nd place in the Documentary Photography (Series) category of the Hungarian Press Photo Contest with her work titled as "Gábor and Kálmán", which tells the story of two men living on the margins of the Roma community. In the same year, she was awarded the Hemző-Károly Prize, a prestigious yearly award for a photographer under 35.
Orpana holds a BA from visual arts from Turku University of Applied Science Art Academy and is currently finishing her MA studies in photography at Aalto University, School of Arts. Orpana has also studied fine arts at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain.
Lately her works have been exhibited in a solo show in Turku Kunstahalle, Turku, Finland (2020), curated group show in Latvian Museum of photography, Riga, Latvia (2019) and in Gallery Lapinlahti in Helsinki, Finland (2018), solo exhibition in Ostrabothnian Photography Centre, Lapua, Finland (2017) and her photographs have been published in a book called A book of lies : väritettyjä totuuksia, (valokuvauksen opiskelijat ry, Aalto Books & Musta taide. Helsinki, 2013).
Andrey Anro (born 1987 Smarhon, Belarus) Lives and works in Berlin, Germany / Minsk, Belarus. His basic tools are painting, photography, digital collage, and installation. Anro explores topics such as collective memory, historical heritage, politics, dictatorship, religion, disappearance and death. He is author of the photobook "Happy Death Society", 2019.
The artist's works are in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow(MOCAK), Poland, in the ART4 Museum in Moscow, in private collections in Lithuania, Sweden, Canada, Russia, and the USA. In 2007 he graduated from MMT L.B. Krasina (Moscow, Russia), speciality "Advertising".
Her practice focuses on projects regarding social and cultural issues. Her research is driven by the need of exploring topics such as time, memories and history connected to her personal experience. She is interested in true and tangible character-driven stories, often told by combining photography and text.
In 2018, Valeria was one the named in ‘British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch.
M.D.C. always starts a conversation about Reference Guide with the last photo in the book, and this time is no exception. He took the photograph in question in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands.
He enjoys telling the story of the Würzburger Lügensteine, a collection of 18th-century fake fossils — known in English as Beringer’s Lying Stones — of which some can be found at the abovementioned museum. In 2017, H.V., who was in charge of managing the science collection, gave M.D.C. and L.K. a guided tour of the museum and told them of all kinds of curiosities to be found there, including the famous Lügensteine. In the early 18th century, two palaeontologists were keen to play a trick on an arrogant colleague, a certain Johann Beringer. They buried a large part of around 2,000 fake fossils — featuring suns, stars, snails, shells and even Hebrew inscriptions — and sent a beautiful young woman, who pretended to be a doctorate student, to visit Beringer with the rest of the stones. He fell into the trap and went in search of the fossils. He found them, believed the hand of God to be the only explanation for these — what were referred to back then as — ”figure stones”, and wrote a scientific article about them.
Things ended badly for everyone. Beringer realised too late that he had been tricked. He took his colleagues to court and won the case; however, his own name will always be associated with the Lügensteine. M.D.C. grins as he tells the story but is no longer sure whether the young lady’s role in it is true.
We read about the entries in Reference Guide at the back of the publication: “The collection demonstrates a surprisingly high interest in characters and phenomena along the sidelines of these episodes and displays a severe tendency to digress”. A few days later, L.K. calls H.V. just to check the story of the Würzburger Lügensteine. It was most likely two small boys who first brought the stones to Johann Beringer.
- Text by Lars Kwakkenbos (.TIFF)
Ana Núñez Rodríguez studied Documentary Photography and Contemporary Creation at IDEP Barcelona, holds a postgraduate degree in Photography from the National University of Colombia and holds a Master degree in Photography and Society from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KABK) in The Hague. She was part of Lighthouse 2020-21, a program for upcoming talents at Fotodok, Utrecht.
His work has been recognized by several public and private institutions, such as the Salomon R. Guggenheim (USA) or the Sasakawa Foundation (Japan-Scandinavia). He has exhibited in numerous countries like: Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Germany, UK, Slovakia, Norway, Russia or Singapore.
His practice is focused on new approaches to the idea of contemporaryy landscape, he has develop different bodies of work such us Metropolis (2018-2019), De Magnete (2016-2018), Environments (2014-2016), Velocidad de las Ventanas (2015) or Almost Black (2011-2015).
Gorospe combines his work as an artist with the study and understanding of the image from a theoretical point of view.
He collaborates in different projects as a curator and photo-editor.
Nazanin Raissi (b. 1981, Tehran) is a Swedish-Iranian artist and clinical psychologist based in Sweden. Centred on the medium of photography, her work ranges from site-specific installations to video animation and sculpture. Her research-based artistic practice explores themes of memory, loss, and displacement.
Veronika Čechmánková is a Czech photographer and mixed-media artist based in Prague. She focuses primarily on the transformation of symbols and traditions over time, and their possible meanings in the present. Taking pieces of visual and cultural history, she examines their validity and possibilities in a contemporary context. Čechmánková studied at the Studio of Photography and New Media at FAMU – Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Czechia. Her work has been exhibited in a range of institutions, including the Center for Contemporary Art FUTURA, Prague; Karlín Studios, Prague; Studio Vortex, Arles; and the BF Artist Film Festival, London.
I started off with photography on a late age, because I have a history of pro-basketball player. I decided to go back and study after I quit basketball. After a stop at RITS Drama school in Brussels I started to study photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent where I got my bachelor in Photography.
I have an undeniable curiosity and hunger for both small and large, well-known and less well-known stories. I use my camera as a key to enter a world or to make any contact. It gives me a fly on the wall feeling, with which I can experience a tranche de vie for a while. I always try to approach my subject as objectively as possible and let my eye do the work.
Photography helps me to understand certain facets of life in a better way.
I've always been attracted to uncommon subjects and stories, which aren't mainstream and easy to approach.
His work has been exhibited in different countries, such as Austria, Poland, China and Denmark. His recent project ¥€$U$ was showed at Hamburg Triannale in 2018.