Polaroids from China (Photography)

Polaroids from China

by Sergey MelniTchenko

“The Consciousness of Misery,” from E. M. Cioran’s A Short History of Decay
Translated by Richard Howard 

Everything conspires, elements and actions alike, to harm you. Arm yourself in disdain, isolate yourself in a fortress of disgust, dream of superhuman indifference? The echoes of time would persecute you in your ultimate absences… When nothing can keep you from bleeding, ideas themselves turn red or encroach on each other like tumors. There is no specific in our pharmacies against existence; nothing but minor remedies for braggarts. But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle…

In Time's sentence men take their place like commas, while, in order to end it, you have immobilized yourself into a period. 

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Sergey Melnitchenko was born in 1991 in Mykolayiv, Ukraine. Today he lives and works in China. He is a member of UPHA – Ukrainian Photographic Alternative. His photography has recently been spotlighted in Feature Shoot, and his first printed publication was Loneliness Online, centering on loneliness and video chats in the modern age. His work has recently been exhibited in Sweden, Israel, Germany, and Chile. Order prints of his work on Eyemazing Editions, and visit his website here. 

Dove da qui (Photography)

Dove da qui

by Sabina Damiani

Sabina Damiani: This project is a note about (almost) abandoned bus stops. It literally deals with time and the phenomenon of transition (traffic), and it comments on the silent disintegration of the once unique (unified) Istrian peninsula, as well as the cracked connections between the people who inhabit it. The spiritual community of a bus has been, to a large extent, replaced by a deceptive sense of individual, automotive independence: waiting rooms actually become informal monuments of the architecture of an overrun era.

There is a sense of emptiness I tried to capture with this project. A lost bus stop where no buses ever come, an infinite waiting for Godot (or for a better time) that never comes. I was also interested in non-places as Marc Augé depicted them; an impersonal, transitional space that we only see as we go by – we never stop, never think, never meet anyone.

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Sabina Damiani was born in Koper, Slovenia, in 1985. She studied Visual Arts and Education at the Fine Art Academy in Venice and gained her MA in Photography at the Fine Art Academy Brera in Milan. Her work could be placed in the intersection of the creation of images and mapping – telling stories, researching collective and personal memories, as well as collective and personal amnesia, narrating the complexities of certain territories and the people who inhabit them. She has exhibited her works internationally and has been featured in a variety of publications, including Ignant, L’Oeil de la Photographie, Fotografia Europea, and Landscape Stories. Visit her website here.

Carmen Colombo (Photography)

Photographs by Carmen Colombo

From “Smog,” The Watcher and Other Stories, by Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver):

Purification was the organ of an Institute, where I was to report, to learn my duties. A new job, an unfamiliar city—had I been younger or had I expected more of life, these would have pleased and stimulated me; but not now, now I could see only the grayness, the poverty that surrounded me, and I could only plunge into it as if I actually liked it, because it confirmed my belief that life could be nothing else. I purposely chose to walk in the most narrow, anonymous, unimportant streets, though I could easily have gone along those with fashionable shop windows and smart cafés; but I didn’t want to miss the careworn expression on the faces of the passersby, the shabby look of the cheap restaurants, the stagnant little stores, and even certain sounds which belong to narrow streets: the streetcars, the braking of pickup trucks, the sizzling of welders in the little workshops in the courtyards: all because that wear, that exterior clashing kept me from attaching too much importance to the wear, the clash that I carried within myself.

But to reach the Institute, I was obliged at one point to enter an entirely different neighborhood, elegant, shaded, old-fashioned, its side streets almost free of vehicles, and its main avenues so spacious that traffic could flow past without noise or jams. It was autumn; some of the trees were golden. The sidewalk did not flank walls, buildings, but fences with hedges beyond them, flower beds, gravel walks, constructions that lay somewhere between the palazzo and the villa, ornate in their architecture. Now I felt lost in a different way, because I could no longer find, as I had done before, things in which I recognized myself, in which I could read the future. (Not that I believe in signs, but when you’re nervous, in a new place, everything you see is a sign.)

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Carmen Colombo was born in 1991. After earning a degree in Photography and Visual Arts at the Istituto Europeo di Design, in 2013 she attended a documentary course at Luz Academy in Milan. She is currently living and working in Milan as a freelance photographer; she is also developing her personal portfolio. She exhibited some of her works at the Photofestival Milano (2012) and at the Jitterbug Gallery in Paris (2016). Her project “Al di qua delle montagne” has been recently selected for the Emerging Talent Awards 2016, and it was exhibited at the Macro Museum in Rome in December 2016. Next March she will publish a book from her work “Al di qua delle montagne” together with Balter Books, a publisher from Turin. Visit her website here.

Atlas (Photography)

Atlas

by Mélanie Desriaux

From Diaries 1914–1923, by Franz Kafka (trans. Martin Greenberg):

June 25, 1914. I paced up and down my room from early morning until twilight. The window was open, it was a warm day. The noises of the narrow street beat in uninterruptedly. By now I knew every trifle in the room from having looked at it in the course of my pacing up and down. My eyes had traveled over every wall. I had pursued the pattern of the rug to its last convolution, noted every mark of age it bore. My fingers had spanned the table across the middle many times. I had already bared my teeth repeatedly at the picture of the landlady’s dead husband.

Toward evening I walked over to the window and sat down on the low sill. Then, for the first time not moving restlessly about, I happened calmly to glance into the interior of the room and at the ceiling. And finally, finally, unless I were mistaken, this room which I had so violently upset began to stir. The tremor began at the edges of the thinly plastered white ceiling. Little pieces of plaster broke off and with a distinct thud fell here and there, as if at random, to the floor. I held out my hand and some plaster fell into it too; in my excitement I threw it over my head into the street without troubling to turn around. The cracks in the ceiling made no pattern yet, but it was already possible somehow to imagine one. But I put these games aside when a bluish violet began to mix with the white; it spread straight out from the center of the ceiling, which itself remained white, even radiantly white, where the shabby electric lamp was stuck. Wave after wave of the color—or was it a light?—spread out toward the now darkening edges. One no longer paid any attention to the plaster that was falling away as if under the pressure of a skillfully applied tool. Yellow and golden-yellow colors now penetrated the violet from the side. But the ceiling did not really take on these different hues; the colors merely made it somewhat transparent; things striving to break through seemed to be hovering above it, already one could almost see the outlines of a movement there, an arm was thrust out, a silver sword swung to and fro. It was meant for me, there was no doubt of that; a vision intended for my liberation was being prepared.

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Born in 1981 in La Rochelle, Mélanie Desriaux lives and works in Paris. She graduated from the School of Fine Arts (Rennes, France, 2006), and completed the Higher Competitive Exam in Education and the Visual Arts, with Photography as a major subject (Aix-en-Provence, France, 2010). Mélanie Desriaux now shows her work in France and abroad. From 2006 to 2012, she exhibited her work at Le Radar Gallery (Bayeux, France), Art & Essai Gallery (University of Rennes 2, France), and the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. Her photographs of the prison of Saint-Martin (Ré island, France) were selected by Carceropolis and are regularly published by the Prison International Observatory. In 2015, she won a scholarship for a wandering photographic tour in the United States. A year later, she was selected by Pascal Amoyel to exhibit her work on the Oregon Trail in Bowen Island (Vancouver, Canada) for FotoFilmic // PULP Gallery & Store. Her work is published by C41 and Camera Infinita, among other outlets. Visit her website here.

Desert Mass (Short Film)

Desert Mass

by John Brian King

Desert Mass is a new short film by John Brian King, art photographer and director of the feature film Redlands. In Redlands, King eschewed typical film editing techniques, featuring instead eight-minute scenes without any camera movement or cutting. Reviewer Angeliki Coconi commented on Redlands: “[It] sits still while everything happens. It doesn’t follow its characters — it watches them. It doesn’t admire or criticize them; it simply looks at them.”

Filmed in Palm Springs, California, King’s latest work Desert Mass focuses on the strange, the disorienting, and the decaying. Its austere style, reminiscent of Redlands, often takes on a dream-like quality, and the accompanying hypnotic organ music underscores the film’s theme of a Satanic mass in an arid, artificial land. Interspersed between alienating landscapes, filmed with the detachment of a wandering traveler, are scenes of two women, each alone in an anonymous hotel room — their distress, which is never explained, surreally related to the unease of the city. It is a brilliant, unconventional work, which you can watch in full above!

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John Brian King is the photographer of LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980–84 and Nude Reagan, both available from Spurl Editions. He is the writer and director of the art house film Redlands (2014) and the short film Model Test (2016). Visit his website here, and check out his latest photography series Sick City.

We will be selling John Brian King’s two photo books at the Philadelphia Art Book Fair on May 5 and 6. Come see us!

Alain Greloud (Photography)

Hôtel de la baie des trépassés
(Bay of the Dead Hotel)

by Alain Greloud

Located between the Pointe du Raz and the Pointe du Van, the Bay of the Dead (Baie des Trépassés) derives its name from a misinterpretation of the Breton Boe An Aon, or bay of the river, into Boe An Anaon, bay of lost souls.

On the beach, a hotel. The Bay of the Dead Hotel, the hotel of “the bay of lost souls.” It is this name that serves as my mantra, and which, throughout this series, will be there like an inner incantation between the seclusion of the room and the harshness of the sea elements. It is the subtitle for each photograph I take. — Alain Greloud

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Située entre la pointe du Raz et celle du Van, la Baie des Trépassés tient son nom d'une déformation du breton Boe An Aon, baie du ruisseau, en Boe An Anaon, baie des âmes en peine.

Sur la plage, un hôtel. L'hôtel de la Baie des Trépassés, hôtel de “la baie des âmes en peine”. C'est ce nom qui me sert de mantra, qui tout au long de cette série, sera là comme une incantation intérieure entre l'enfermement de la chambre et la rudesse des éléments marins. Il est le sous-titre de chaque photo que je prends.

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Alain Greloud lives and works in Paris. With a degree in journalism, he now works exclusively as a freelance photographer. Greloud’s personal photographic research is influenced by travel and literature. More contemplative and narrative than informative, his photos – tinged with solitude – are often polysemous and leave much room for reflection and the imagination. If his work is sometimes marked by the notable absence of human presence, he also treats the theme of humanity more directly through portraiture, notably Man’s place in his environment and the body’s place in spaces. Alain Greloud thinks of photography as poetic introspection, a reflection on the world around us that we often do not know how to see. His work is distributed by the Plainpicture Agency. Visit his website here.

Portraits of Spurl

Portraits of Spurl

Andy Adams @FlakPhoto

Kim Cooper @kimcooper / Larry Edmunds Bookshop @LarryEdmunds1

Edward Carey @EdwardCarey70 / bought at @MalvernBooksTX

Naomi Fry @frynaomifry

Stephen Sparks @rs_sparks / Point Reyes Books @PointReyesBooks

Alex Maslansky / Stories Books @StoriesEchoPark

Kliph Nesteroff @ClassicShowbiz

Grafiche Morandi

Clare Kelly @NewAgeSext

Denise Enck / Empty Mirror @EmptyMirror

@apg_agape

John Coulthart @johncoulthart

@soft_dread

Kathleen Graulty and Julian Lucas / Mirrored Society @MirroredSociety

Small Press Distribution @spdbooks / New Museum @newmuseum

John Coulthart @johncoulthart

@SayYesBalto

J. M. Schriber @roughghosts

@SaraKChaffin

Ed Turner / Biblioklept @biblioklept

Thank you to all of the wonderful, sensational artists who have taken part in PORTRAITS OF SPURL, and who are are not ashamed to read and sell our misfit books!

Beatrice Migliorati (Photography)

Photographs by Beatrice Migliorati

How did you begin taking photographs?

I remember I was in a tiny train station waiting room in Trento, waiting for a three-hour train ride back home. I was sitting there, bored, and I saw these brown chairs – four in a row – just in front of me, with a light gray marble wall behind them. It was so simple yet so strong and evocative: probably because that setting was pretty anachronistic, I felt like I was back in the ’70s. I started photographing it with my phone but it was so disappointing, I felt the need to have more control over the creation in order to better express what I was living. I really felt like “writing things down” without using words, communicating through impressions. A couple of months later I started using a film camera and studying a lot, teaching myself. I try hard to embrace and translate into photography the feeling a place could evoke.

What is your photographic process like? Do you carry your camera with you everywhere, working spontaneously, or plan your photographs in advance?

I’m really bad at planning when it comes to photography: I usually write down some general ideas for a series but I only photograph when I feel the need. When I worked on Saturday nights I used to go out, as normal, carrying the tripod and the cameras and eventually stopping to photograph; I had some subjects I wanted to photograph, but my ideas mainly came spontaneously by looking out the car window. I always go around with at least a camera, anywhere I go, even to the supermarket or to university. I can’t help doing it in this way, I can’t predict how the light will look like so I need to be ready even when I’m out for the most banal errands.

Why do you photograph on film?

I started with film when I was about 14; my parents gave me a Lomo camera and I enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately it broke after a while and I gave up. I tried several times with digital but it never worked out for me. I think film throws me into reality: analog photography turns a real moment into an existent object, it’s not a mere and inconsistent simulacrum, it has substance. And it made me much more patient and careful.

Who are some photographers (or other artists) who have influenced you? How have they influenced you?

Among the photographers I really admire are William Eggleston, Todd Hido and Wolfgang Tillmans, all for different reasons: Eggleston taught me that everything is worth a portrait and that there are no poor subjects, he helped me become aware of prosaic and daily scenes; Hido helped me in creating the groundwork for potential stories, starting from evocative sceneries that drag you into the space, making you feel the subject of that piece of reality. Tillmans’ work, especially the still lifes and portraits, helped me to focus on details and close-ups, to get physically and emotionally closer to the subject, leaving aside for a moment the environmental space.

I really like music as well and I mainly listen to Italian music because I often translate the songs into images automatically. I hope to work on that soon.

What are some subjects that you do not (or would not) photograph? Why is that?

I wouldn’t set any limit, I often change my mind and go back to things that initially didn’t feel right to me – I’m currently trying black-and-white film for the first time. All those opportunities actually thrill me, there’s always something new to explore, from different points of view. The only limit I have is myself. Taking photos of people, for example, is really difficult for me because I feel I can’t fake it, I need a connection with the people I portray so we need to get to know each other, I need to sit down, have a coffee and a long chat and make sure that the person I would like to photograph is comfortable with it.

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Beatrice Migliorati was born in 1996 in a small village in northern Italy. She lived in Scotland for one year and she is currently living in Bologna, where she studies philosophy. Follow her work on her Instagram, Flickr, and Tumblr.

Beatrice Migliorati’s photographs will be displayed at Galetér di Nadia e Rachele from April 1st to April 22nd, and at a bookshop in Reggio Emilia, Italy, as part of the Fotografia Europea Festival from May 5th to July 15th.

Monopoly (Photography)

Monopoly

By Mike Osborne

Mike Osborne on his series: Monopoly is set in Atlantic City and revolves around the historical connection between the city’s street grid and the iconic board game’s properties. Like Floating Island, which was published in 2014, the project is about the site and its history as well as the use of photography as a means of modeling the world. Originally inspired by “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” a 1972 essay by John McPhee, Monopoly translates the game board’s map into photographs that grapple with Atlantic City’s complicated past and present. This gesture of converting abstractions—the purple rectangles known as Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues, for example—into carefully rendered representations of actual places is mildly absurd but also serious, an oblique means of reflecting on the problems that have plagued many American cities over the last half-century.

Osborne notes that his statement was written well before Trump’s candidacy and election. The project was shot mostly between 2012 and 2014, and looking back, he explains that he “inadvertently tracked the demise of Trump’s casinos. While working on the photographs and a related video piece, Trump Plaza and, more recently, the Trump Taj Mahal closed.”

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Mike Osborne is a photographer living in Austin, Texas. His work touches on a range of themes including architecture, landscape, history, and technology, ultimately taking the form of books and exhibitions. His first book, Floating Island, was published in summer 2014. Follow his work on his website here.

Dreary Town (Photography)

Dreary Town

By Enrico Doria

Enrico Doria’s series Dreary Town was inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.” Doria photographed his series with a Holga camera, capturing the towns of Sicily (Trapani and Palermo), Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, Sarajevo, Milano, Johannesburg, and Tallin.

Thanks to Doria’s distinctive look (high-contrast, slightly shaken, and deliberately imperfect), his photographs feel at times like glimpses. The glimpse of a man or woman going to work, or to the train station; a wanderer glancing upward. Yet there is a deliberate sameness to these glimpses, which extends from Johannesburg to Paris. The sameness of modern life, of the memories created by an identical commute. Here the well-traveled city is a receptacle of memories (psychically recorded by workers and travelers), which are all alike. Doria writes that he wanted to portray the “impersonality of the city, showing the cold regularity of some urban architecture and the small places in which many of us are living, sometimes in contrast with the spaces all around.” 

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Enrico Doria was born in Palermo in 1978 and received his PhD in Genetics and Biomolecular Sciences at the University of Pavia. He currently works in Pavia. His photographs have been published widely in several national and international magazines, including LensCulture and Lomography. He has exhibited his photography, which he often shoots on medium format film, in various Italian and foreign cities, including at the Spaziofarini6 Gallery in Milan. Follow his work on his website here.

Doria recently prepared a book dummy for his photography series Esprits, which you can – and should! – check out here.

Egypt in Silence (Photography)

Egypt in Silence

By Violetta Tonolli

Violetta Tonolli on “Egypt in Silence”: Living in Cairo makes me forget the feeling of silence. Living here accustoms us to a continuous and perpetual noise, one which becomes the soundtrack to each and every one of our lives.

Walking through thousands of bodies, which move slowly and continuously in every direction; walking through the cars, the donkeys and their carts, the bicycles, the motorbikes and the microbuses makes me feel part of a stream of life, but at the same time immensely lonely.

The rarity of the experience of silence makes it even more important and precious for me and so I tried to capture the silence of Cairo with my eyes, looking for visual expressions of emptiness which would restore an experience of wellness with my inner self, a positive sensation of solitude.

The aesthetics of silence accompanied me in the desert, where I looked for traces of human life, above all traces of abandonment, which would bring me a sense of inner solitude. This intimate feeling of solitude was linked to the one I felt in Cairo. The experience I uncovered through my camera has helped me to rediscover myself within the context of a conscious solitude; a solitude that has made me feel closer to the deeper parts of myself and, in consequence, more capable of appreciating and understanding the numerous faces of Egypt.

In this compilation, I gather the images that represent the path I walked to attain this feeling of silence.

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Violetta Tonollli was born in 1989 and grew up in Milan. At the University of Turin, she read Arabic and English literature and developed a passion for photography, which she then devoted herself to. Following her graduation, she learned from Fulvio Bortolozzo, a well-known cityscape photographer and professor at the IED of Turin. She traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East and resided for two years in Egypt.

Tonolli now lives in Paris, where she continues her work in cityscape and experimental photography. She has exhibited her project “Egypt in Silence” in the Goethe Institute in Cairo, and the project was published in the photography magazine REST. She received first place in the 2016 “L’anno della luce” photography competition hosted by Phos Turin.

Last House Standing (Photography)

Last House Standing

By Ben Marcin

Ben Marcin on “Last House Standing”: One of the architectural quirks of certain cities on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. is the solo row house. Standing alone, in some of the most distressed neighborhoods, these nineteenth-century structures were once attached to similar row houses that made up entire city blocks. Time and major demographic changes have resulted in the decay and demolition of many such blocks of row houses. Occasionally, one house is spared — literally cut off from its neighbors and left to the elements with whatever time it has left.

My interest in these solitary buildings is not only in their ghostly beauty but in their odd, almost defiant, placement in the urban landscape. Often three stories high, they were clearly not designed to stand alone like this. Many details that might not be noticed in a homogeneous row of twenty attached row houses become apparent when everything else has been torn down. And then there's the lingering question of why a single row house was allowed to remain upright. Still retaining traces of its former glory, the last house standing is often still occupied.

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Most of Ben Marcin’s photographic essays explore the idea of home and the passing of time. “Last House Standing” and “The Camps” have received wide press both nationally and abroad (The Paris Review, iGnant, La Repubblica, Slate, Wired Magazine). More recently, Marcin has been exploring the myriad structures of the urban core in series like Towers, Streets and Stairwells. His photographs have been shown at a number of national galleries and venues including the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Delaware Art Museum; The Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA; The Center for Fine Art Photography in Ft. Collins, CO; The Photographic Resource Center in Boston; and the Houston Center for Photography. Last House Standing (And Other Stories) was featured in a 2014 solo exhibit at the C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore. Marcin's work is also in several important collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art. He is represented by the C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland.

Gasworks (Photography)

Gasworks

By Nikos Markou

Nikos Markou’s aesthetic – black-and-white film, shot with available light, stark yet intimate – is the perfect complement to the space of the Gasworks and those who work there. Unlike the Bechers, he goes past the building’s façade to catch glimpses of capitalism’s inner workings: men showering, relaxing, laboring in this plant that looks like it came out of a 1940s prison movie. In fact, Markou took these photographs in 1982–1984 at the Athens Gasworks, right before it ceased its operations, and years before it became the museum it is today. His photographs show the plant in its last iconic gasp.

Markou writes about this series, “What urged me to start working on this project was originally the look of the factory itself which, back then, had a dry unique character. I was interested in getting to know the workers so I started visiting them regularly, watching them work and depicting their lives any way I could. What I experienced throughout this process was definitely much more powerful than what is depicted in the photos, yet I hope that these manage to express, to a certain extent, the hardships that these people had to endure trying to make a living.”

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Nikos Markou was born in Athens in 1959. He studied mathematics in Athens. He first entered the photographic scene with the publication of Perama in 1980 while also commencing his professional career in advertising and teaching photography (1985–1998). His interest focuses on the Greek landscape and people, and he has published two photographic monographs (Geometries, 1999, and Cosmos, 2003). He works with magazines, publishing houses, and large-scale export companies, while at the same time his works belong to private and public collections. He lives and works in Athens. Learn more about his work here.

You might also like…
Nikos Markou’s Perama
John Brian King’s LAX: Photographs of Los Angeles 1980–84

Beautiful Boy (Photography)

Beautiful Boy

By Lissa Rivera

From Mademoiselle de Maupin by Théophile Gautier (Penguin 2006):

Just imagine not being able to grow by a single particle, a single atom. Unable to make the blood of others flow in your veins. Seeing always with your own eyes, neither more clearly, nor farther, nor differently. Hearing sounds with the same ears and the same emotion. Touching with the same old fingers. Perceiving a variety of things with an organ that is invariable. Being condemned to the same tone of voice, always the same accents, the same phrases and the same words, and not be able to go away, to hide from yourself, or escape to some place where you cannot be followed; forced to put up with yourself for ever, to dine and sleep with yourself, to be the same man for twenty new women, to drag around an obligatory person in the midst of the strangest episodes of your life’s drama, when you know your role by heart; to think the same things, to have the same dreams, what torture, what boredom!

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Lissa Rivera is a photographer based in Brooklyn, NY whose work has received multiple grants and honors and been exhibited internationally. She grew up near Rochester, New York, home of Eastman Kodak, where as a child she was exposed to the treasures at the Eastman Museum. After receiving her MFA from The School of Visual Arts, Rivera worked professionally in collections, including the Museum of the City of New York, where she became fascinated with the social history of photography and the evolution of identity in relationship to photographic technologies. Beautiful Boy, Rivera’s latest project, takes her interest in photography’s connection with identity to a personal level, focusing on her domestic partner as muse. Lissa is represented by ClampArt in New York. Visit her website here and follow her on Instagram.

Current and upcoming exhibitions:

Non-Binary
Centre Never Apart (Montreal)
October 5, 2016 – January 14, 2017

The Photo Review 2016
Gallery 1401, Philadelphia University of the Arts
November 4 – December 7, 2016

Portraits 2017
The Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO)
January 14, 2017 – February 25, 2017

Suicide Machine (Photography)

Suicide Machine

By Dan Wood

How did you choose the term “Suicide Machine” to describe this series? Once you chose the title, did it have an impact on what or how you photographed? Did this title affect the way people have responded to your series?

Originally the project was about the skateboard scene/culture in Bridgend (I’m an ageing skateboarder) and the narrative was going to be about how skateboarding saves lives – metaphorically.

I had already made a series about the South Wales skateboard scene, so I decided that I would step out of my comfort zone and make something completely new, with a new narrative. My wife was pregnant with our first child at the time so I wanted to focus it around that. The title did have an impact on what I shot. At first I found myself shooting mostly depressing scenes which were photographic cliches, and I was determined to avoid that. So I found myself going out on sunnier days and looking for more colourful scenes (this was my first ever colour project). The narrative was evolving all the time and I found myself constantly learning new things too.

The response to the series was generally good, although I was accused (on Twitter) a couple of times of glamourising suicide and being insensitive, which really made me angry as they obviously hadn’t read the project synopsis and were jumping to conclusions due to the title. I did feel though that I was entitled to make a series about my hometown and call it whatever I liked, and it was this that carried me through most of the time. The project was not directly about the suicides, it was about a town synonymous with suicide, and I kept having to explain that.

What was your experience like of publishing Suicide Machine?

The whole experience was pretty straight forward. I was very lucky in fact. The series had been featured on a popular blog called Another Place Magazine and the blog creator, Iain Sarjeant, emailed me out of the blue to tell me that he was starting a publishing house called Another Place Press – which would publish small, editioned, high quality, affordable photo books – and asked would I be interested in Suicide Machine being one of the first titles. Of course it was a no-brainer, the only downside being that we had about 6 weeks to put it all together, which was a test of character, especially as I had a trip to Iceland planned. But thankfully everything fell into place without incident and we managed to make the book exactly how I wanted it. I had just finished the project after 3.5 years working on it, so it was perfect timing; the book sold out within a month.

How has the modern omnipresence of photography influenced your artistic choices?

I’ve been constantly taking pictures for over 20 years and it’s something I will do until I die. I have to take pictures every day. The world is drowning in photography and I love it and hate it at the same time, but for me, putting a roll of film in a camera and going for a wander is what keeps me sane, and now that my daughter is old enough to come wandering with me, it’s just perfect.

Trying to get noticed these days is tough, but in some weird way this has helped me, as I now prefer to dig in deep and just make work regardless of the fact if anyone sees it or not. I’m done with constantly spending time on social media when the time could be used constructively. I saw a quote once that said “If a project is good enough, people will discover it” and that has been my mantra for a while now. I truly believe if work is good enough it will float to the top regardless of social media presence. This inspires me to just do the best I can and if certain projects of mine don’t get noticed, then they’re obviously not good enough.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a project called “Gap in the Hedge – The Bwlch,” which is well under way. The series explores a mountain pass that connects Bridgend to the South Wales Valleys. It is a reflection of a journey I made with my mother every Saturday to visit relatives when I was little. The pass itself was built in the 1920s and provided a lifeline for those “stuck” in the valleys, especially when it came to employment opportunities. I’ve also decided to include the immediate villages on each side of the pass in the project, so I think it’s going to be interesting to engage with the people of these villages and find out more about the pass and how they feel it has benefitted them in whatever way. I’m giving myself 2-3 years to complete this.

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Born in 1974, Bridgend, South Wales, UK, Dan Wood – a self taught photographer – discovered photography in 1995 through skateboarding and the culture that surrounds it. Inspiration comes from a wide subject matter and although diverse, he considers himself predominantly a documentary photographer – shooting stories in both traditional and contemporary approach. His work has been featured in many publications including CCQ, Ernest Journal and Black & White Photography. He has participated in over 45 exhibitions both nationally and internationally; including 5 solo shows. Visit his website here.

Gifts from Spurl Editions

Get excited, because now you can show the world how refined your taste is in literature while looking stunning at the same time! Our store features a screen-printed tote bag so that you can carry your books to the French château you live in with panache, and an I AM NOT ASHAMED t-shirt that will quickly take over as your one true vestiary love.

I Am Not Ashamed T-shirt

$18.00

This glamorous unisex t-shirt from Spurl Editions features the cover of Barbara Payton’s I Am Not Ashamed on the front, and the Spurl logo on the back. It was screen-printed locally by Windmill City Screen Printing on Next Level-brand shirts. Wear this shirt, and announce to the world: YOU ARE NOT ASHAMED.

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Spurl Tote Bag

$10.00

This tote bag from Spurl Editions features a quote from Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Bougrelon on one side, and the Spurl logo on the other side. It was screen-printed locally by Windmill City Screen Printing. Carry this bag and announce to the world that you are a DECADENT MARVEL.

I am an idea in an era that has no more of them.

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Imitation of Life (Photography)

Imitation of Life

by Ofer Wolberger

“I considered that the homes that people live in exactly describe their lives. They are always behind those window crossings, behind bars or staircases. Their homes are their prisons. They are imprisoned even by the tastes of the society in which they live. In All That Heaven Allows this woman is imprisoned by her home, her family, her society. They are imprisoned in two ways – by their personal habits, and by the class to which they belong, which is slightly above the middle class. The middle class is more anonymous. For instance, in All I Desire, it is the academic society which is another prison. The drama teacher is in love with the guy, but he can’t make a move. He wants his goddamned promotion. He’s in his prison, too. This goes all the way up to Written on the Wind. There they are imprisoned by wealth. They are the kaput haute bourgeoisie. They have gone from the simple society to complete decadence. But in between, in the upper middle class, there is upper middle class elegance only. That living room in All That Heaven Allows has a certain elegance. I worked for UFA as a set designer, you know. I believe my pictures reflect this, even in a sort of continuity. In Written on the Wind the mirrors that run throughout are marbelized. They are not clear mirrors anymore. Even the reflections have become clouded.

“In All That Heaven Allows the town is shown as being arranged around the church steeple. You don’t see them going to church, because that would be too much on the nose. But even that church is a prison, just like the homes, which are their cages. People ask me why there are so many flowers in my films. Because these homes are tombs, mausoleums filled with the corpses of plants. The flowers have been sheared and are dead, and they fill the homes with a funeral air.”

– Douglas Sirk

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Ofer Wolberger currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2001 with a Masters Degree in Photography and Related Media. In 2012, he completed 12 Books, a series of self-published artists books and was awarded the Printed Matter Award for Artists. In August of 2013 he was a resident at Light Work in Syracuse. Last year he published a book of photographs titled Billie and in February 2015 he will have a solo exhibition of his recent paintings at Stene Projects in Stockholm, Sweden. Visit his website here.

Ioanna Chronopoulou (Photography)

Photographs by Ioanna Chronopoulou

dichotomy < Greek dichotomía:
The images in my ongoing project “Dichotomy” are rooted in their literal meaning. A division into two parts. A subdivision into halves or pairs. A division into two mutually exclusive or contradictory groups. It’s this logical rationale that informs the pictures of the series “Dichotomy,” each set relative to the other yet wholly independent. A series of relationships we are asked to explore, to form. A subjective view of ordinary life, places and objects that are imbued with their own history. A story about Athens, but also a story for every city that is built by society and is left to fend to itself. – Ioanna Chronopoulou

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Born in Athens in 1990, Ioanna Chronopoulou graduated from the Focus School of Art, Photography, and New Technologies in 2013. She continued her photographic studies in the research residency programs of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, France. She currently works as a freelance photographer, and as a Photo Editor for Kathimerini Newspaper’s Κ Magazine. You can visit her website here.

Charlotte Hooij (Photography)

Photographs by Charlotte Hooij

Charlotte Hooij took many of these photographs in Brussels, depicting the inner life of a historic, bureaucratic city. With brilliant colors and a refreshing candid formalism, her photographs of men and women in uncomfortable habitats are reminiscent of Georges Simenon’s portrayals of existentially lost northern Europeans.

From Pedigree, by Georges Simenon, translated by Robert Baldick (available from NYRB):

Now the street was empty, with just a thin drizzle to give it a touch of life. The shop-windows had disappeared one after another behind their iron curtains. The men with frozen noses who distributed coloured prospectuses at the doors of the dress shops had vanished into the darkness. The trams were rarer and made more din; the monotonous noise that could be distinguished in the background was that of the muddy waves of the Meuse breaking against the piers of the Pont des Arches.

In the streets all around, there were plenty of little cafés with frosted-glass windows and cream curtains, but Désiré never set foot in a café except on Sunday morning, at eleven o’clock, and then always at the Renaissance.

He was already scanning the windows inquiringly. He did not think about eating. He kept taking his watch out of his pocket and now and then he would start talking to himself.

At ten o’clock, he was the only person left on the pavement. He had scarcely so much as frowned on seeing some gendarmes’ helmets over in the direction of the Place Saint-Lambert.

Twice he had climbed the stairs, and strained his ears to catch some noise; twice he had fled, frightened, sick at heart.

“Excuse me…”

The policeman at the corner of the street, standing underneath a big dummy clock with its hands fixed, had nothing to do.

“Could you tell me the right time?”

Then with a strained, apologetic smile:

“Time seems to go so slowly when one’s waiting…”

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Charlotte Hooij is a photographer and a student at the Luca School of Arts in Brussels, Belgium. Follow her work on her website and on Instagram.

Lido (Photography)

Lido

by Allegra Martin

Allegra Martin took this series of deliciously lethargic, sun-bleached photographs in 2013 and 2014 in northern Italy. The images are part of her photographic research, which was commissioned by Osservatorio Fotografico (a photography research group based in Ravenna) for the project “Where We Live.” Osservatorio Fotografico launched this project in 2009; its goal was to build a visual archive of the city of Ravenna. 

Martin’s corner of Ravenna was Lido Adriano, a seaside town a few miles away from Ravenna. It is a town full of condominiums, Martin reports, “where you meet lives, stories, and destinies.” As she was photographing, she felt as though she was in search of something, and that something eluded her.

The spirit of this town, however, did not elude her. Her photographs truly seem to embody this little seaside town, this little condominium, these bored little old Italian men and women. Martin’s focus on place is phenomenal, lending her work a unique intimacy, creating an entire psycho-geography of this ignored locale.

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Allegra Martin was born in Vittorio Veneto and she currently lives in Milan, Italy. She graduated from the Venice Institute of Architecture in Venice. In 2015 she took part in the photographic research project “The Third Island,” and in 2012 she participated in "Welfare Spaces." Her photographs are currently on display at “On New Italian Photography” curated by Fantom at Viasaterna Gallery in Milan. Visit her website here.

Photographs by Allegra Martin are featured as part of the collective exhibition LACUNA/AE. Identity and Modern Architecture in Venice. The exhibit will be open from May 28 to August 28, 2016, at Venice’s Torre Massimiliana, on Sant’Erasmo island.

More Italian photography from the Spurl Editions blog: “Villaggio Laguna” by Francesca Gardini