Masters of photography
Roberto Kusterle was born in Gorizia in 1948, where he still lives and works.
He began with painting and installation in the 1970’s, before identifying photography as the ideal means for his artistic expression.
During the following years the principal themes of his poetics emerged: a continuity between the human, animal and vegetable world, the mediating role of the body, the negation of the gaze, the constant practice of irony, ambiguity and displacement to shape an idea and to make the viewer wonder.
Photography is used to maintain the tension between fiction and reality. Kusterle has a very personal approach to the camera: the actual taking of the picture is only the last step in a complex and articulated creative process.
I want to show emotion and I want to have emotions. This is one of my main objectives with photography. Life is made of feelings, that’s what I choose to look for. It’s necessary to have the feeling one wants to transmit; sensitivity is the base. I’m looking for the little things that move me. It’s an infinite search for beauty, trying to see a kind of magic in details. Learning to see things that people don’t see and then share it with them. And the more life goes on, the more I learn to enjoy those details.
My inspiration is simple curiosity, constant observation, and astonishment by what surrounds me. A part of it is willingness to enjoy every part of it. Everyday life, is what inspires me. And that fundamental need, that I was born with, to create and to share with others my emotions.
Hélène Desplechin.
One of the most influential and important photographic artists of the 21st century, Roger Ballen’s photographs span over forty years. His strange and extreme works confront the viewer and challenge them to come with him on a journey into their own minds as he explores the deeper recesses of his own.
Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950 but for over 30 years he has lived and worked in South Africa. His work as a geologist took him out into the countryside and led him to take up his camera and explore the hidden world of small South African towns. At first he explored the empty streets in the glare of the midday sun but, once he had made the step of knocking on people’s doors, he discovered a world inside these houses which was to have a profound effect on his work. These interiors with their distinctive collections of objects and the occupants within these closed worlds took his unique vision on a path from social critique to the creation of metaphors for the inner mind. After 1994 he no longer looked to the countryside for his subject matter finding it closer to home in Johannesburg.
Over the past thirty five years his distinctive style of photography has evolved using a simple square format in stark and beautiful black and white. In the earlier works in the exhibition his connection to the tradition of documentary photography is clear but through the 1990s he developed a style he describes as ‘documentary fiction’. After 2000 the people he first discovered and documented living on the margins of South African society increasingly became a cast of actors working with Ballen in the series’ Outland (2000, revised in 2015) and Shadow Chamber (2005) collaborating to create powerful psychodramas.
The line between fantasy and reality in his subsequent series’ Boarding House (2009) and Asylum of the Birds (2014) became increasingly blurred and in these series he employed drawings, painting, collage and sculptural techniques to create elaborate sets. There was an absence of people altogether, replaced by photographs of individuals now used as props, by doll or dummy parts or where people did appear it was as disembodied hands, feet and mouths poking disturbingly through walls and pieces of rag. The often improvised scenarios were now completed by the unpredictable behaviour of animals whose ambiguous behaviour became crucial to the overall meaning of the photographs. In this phase Ballen invented a new hybrid aesthetic, but one still rooted firmly in black and white photography.
In his artistic practice Ballen has increasingly been won over by the possibilities of integrating photography and drawing. He has expanded his repertoire and extended his visual language. By integrating drawing into his photographic and video works, the artist has not only made a lasting contribution to the field of art, but equally has made a powerful commentary about the human condition and its creative potential.
His contribution has not been limited to stills photography and Ballen has been the creator of a number of acclaimed and exhibited short films that dovetail with his photographic series’. The collaborative film I Fink You Freeky, created for the cult band Die Antwoord in 2012, has garnered over 125-million hits on YouTube. He has taken his work into the realms of sculpture and installation, at Paris’ Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (2017), Australia’s Sydney College of the Arts (2016) and at the Serlachius Museum in Finland (2015) is to name but a few. The spectacular installation at Les Rencontres d’Arles 2017, “House of the Ballenesque” was voted as one of the best exhibitions for 2017. In 2018 at the Wiesbaden Biennale, Germany, another installation “Roger Ballen’s Bazaar/Bizarre” was created in an abandoned shopping centre.
Ballen’s series, The Theatre of Apparitions (2016), is inspired by the sight of these hand-drawn carvings on blacked-out windows in an abandoned women’s prison.
Ballen started to experiment using different spray paints on glass and then ‘drawing on’ or removing the paint with a sharp object to let natural light through. The results have been likened prehistoric cave-paintings: the black, dimensionless spaces on the glass are canvases onto which Ballen has carved his thoughts and emotions. He also released a related animated film, Theatre of Apparitions, which has been nominated for various awards.
The most sorrowful songs of humans would be composed when your are hanged on the rope of time, between the ground and the air, yesterday and today, with a cold smile on your face and with a distressed mind to look upon the events that happened in the past and fearfully waiting for the coming events that will happen in the future. Does Samad Ghorbanzadeh stricken with sleepwalking? or this is just his midday wanderings to be freed from the turbulent dreams which are not letting him go. His works represents his inner side that takes us to a mysterious and obscure mind and they leave us there alone, with our apprehension. First charactered person in many of his photos is a teenager who became younger and smaller, like a person that is not getting maturer by the time that stopped for him, and he is involved with a luggage of wishes, imaginations, feelings and atrocity. Samad Ghorbanzadeh in facing the world with putting his model or subject in an unknown places is showing the destruction and disappearance of a lost and forgotten world which is just a wasteland and nothing more. The simple creation of photos with less elements and with centering them in the photos without any twisting and connecting them to visual games, makes the viewer to receive and understand his mysterious mind so easily. The photos don’t belong to any period of time, neither to past nor to future, but at the same time they look like the remnants of mankind’s destroyed memories which are just forcing to bring back a past in front of their faces and to impose the evanescence of human values and sometime beyond the time and the place it makes you to fall in a trap of fear that is like a massive punishment for your indiscreet sin, and for you to fear the falling into the time’s darkest potholes. Masterly implementation of his works, takes the audience so much close to the reality that even with being sure that they have been illustrated and causes them (the viewers) to get closer to a subjective and tangible reality which is like a swaying pendulum of a clock between dream and the reality.
I am a fine art photographer based in Rome, Italy. I am fond of those shots that require a great physical effort, as the bond that links me to the model impersonating a certain character makes him feel for a while the pain and hell my heart spent my entire life within.
I love shooting at night between whores and smokey factories – where what I’m hunting for hides. Everything becomes dangerous and irresistible. I love fires, smokes, woods and the fog; people with irregular teeth, sounds in reverse, digestive systems and revolving doors; math, stairs, flesh and the names of prescription drugs.
When I take a shot, I’m not just quietly portraying the world around me. Oceans, cars, mountains and bodies are an extension of my own Calvary. The ultimate proof of the impossibility of life.
Cursa estudios de arte y música. En los sesenta se traslada a Madrid para estudiar arte dramático y ejerce la fotografía freelance. Desde 1977 comparte su dedicación con la docencia. Desde su primera exposición en 1971 ha realizado innumerables muestras en galerías nacionales e internacionales. Su obra está presente en colecciones publicas y privadas. En 1980 funda y dirige la revista POPtografia. Desde sus principios ha compaginado su obra personal con la editorial de moda, ilustración y campañas de publicidad. Ha colaborado en publicaciones como Vogue, Elle, Cosmopólitan, Tendencias, El Pais, Vanidad, etc. Es así mismo autor de cursos especializados y seminarios, y Director del Máster Internacional de Moda en EFTI (Escuela de Fotografía y Técnicas de la Imagen). En 1997 estancia de varios meses en NY. Con ocasión de PHE 2002 se organiza una retrospectiva que abarca obra de los últimos treinta años. En la actualidad vive y trabaja en Madrid dedicado exclusivamente al desarrollo de su obra personal, incluyendo el video, literatura y la docencia.
Like many, the love for photography is something that accompanies me from the first moments of my life. Only in the last few years I have had the material opportunity to devote myself to it with passion, intensity and constancy. I’m not a photographer by profession. And any definition doesn’t affect my passion for photography.
For predisposition and predilection, I make photos exclusively in analog. And I develop my films by myself. 35mm, but especially medium format. I love photography in black and white. And I work mostly with long exposures of landscapes and urban contexts. I am completely self-taught. The little or very little that I know about photography, I’ve learned it by experience. Instinct and experience. Sensitivity and experience. Failures and experience.
What I try to recreate through my photos, what I try to bring out through them, is a feeling of alienation and loneliness.
Cities are like shells of social exclusion, crowded with ghosts. Individuals alone and isolated, alien to themselves and towards others. Anonymous faceless souls.
The landscapes of the sea are cold sterile lunar surfaces. Lifeless and unable to accommodate its seeds. Distant landscapes, perhaps dispersed in space, perhaps promised lands never existed.
This is the human condition. Unease, alienation, loneliness, lack of communication, dereliction.
Dodo was born in Osaka in 1947.He graduated in fine arts from Kyushu Sangyo University in 1970, and started teaching at Tōkyō Shashin Senmon Gakkō (now Visual Arts College Tokyo). Two years later he started work as a teacher of photography at Ōsaka Shashin Senmon Gakkō; in 1998 he was made head of the school, by that time renamed Visual Arts College Osaka.
Dodo was present when the film director Naomi Kawase, who had first been a student of his and was later teaching at Visual Arts Senmon Gakkō, had her first baby on 24 April 2004, in Nara. This was filmed as Tarachime and Dodo photographed the event; the photographs were exhibited in Nara, Tokyo, and Locarno, and published as Haha
Dodo’s book of large-format black-and-white photographs A Radiant Land: Kii Peninsula won the PSJ’s Annual Award for 1995; his later collection of large-format colour photographs of the peninsula, A Radiant Land with Thousands of Years, was exhibited in Nara City Museum of Photography in 2000 The latter work also won him the Ina Nobuo Award in 1999.
Dodo has said that his major influences were Shōmei Tōmatsu, especially his Ryūkyū series “Pencil of the Sun”, and Yutaka Takanashi, for the way in which Takanashi’s concentration on Tokyo showed Dodo his own possibilities in Osaka. Among the photographers he admires are Robert Frank and William Klein.
Schilte & Portielje, who live and work in Rotterdam, are primarily known for their photography of series of unusual and very recognizable figurines. They display an intricate way of playing with and relating to each other: fantastic poetic, dreamlike figures who abduct the spectator into the artists world of wonders and miracles. The figures approach in the middle of a nondescript, plain, undefined room. They offer frontal and back views and grotesquely contorted bodies. They wear costumes adorned with veils and lace, corsages and garters, jewelry, neckties and collars, transparent fabrics and body hugging clothes. All these accessories create different characters in this theatric role play. The game lives of abstraction. How do huge feet go with a delicate body? Which intricacies are woven into the mesh of physical abnormalities? How do these bodies relate to the pieces of furniture that have been added to the decor for the characters to hold onto or lean against? It is the full intention of the artists not to give a satisfactory answer to these questions, they willingly create confusion and force the spectator to focus more intensely.
During recent years, the artists perfected their mise en scene. “Photoworks beyond reality” emphasizes surprising moments in surrealist, erotically charged moments. This creates a scrapbook full of subtle hints and uncertain role play. We can never see the full faces of Schilte & Portielje‘s figurines, mouth and nose are rarely recognizable, the entire head is mostly covered by eclectic hats, fabrics, hairdos or the entire face is headed another way.
Subtle eroticism, demanding poses or the quiet poetry of desire are the elements used in this dark world rich in contrast. Most of the time, female characters appear in his series. „Our work deals with the fundamental aspects of human existence, male or female alike. Sexual identity is not our subject, but ambiguity is important for us because it creates room for interpretation and identification,” say the artists.
Huub Schilte and Jacqueline Portielje collaborate since 1997 under the name Schilte & Portielje. „We prefer to work in absence of a preset theme or subject. We chose fragments of images from our own digital library, and then proceed independently to determine how the chosen fragment could fit into the concept of the new work. Frequently, we exchange the works so that one continues where the other stopped.”
Sometimes their work reminds the viewer of the sought-after Carte de Visite images, in fashion during the second half of the 19th century. However, the subjects of Schilte & Portielje are extremely timely. Their forms and design with historical patterns – like the consistent use of black-and-white photography reference analog role models. But the photographers use a well developed digital collage technique to achieve their trademark figurine, very much anchored in the present. „Most importantly, we look at our work settled somewhere between photography and painting. We love contrast between computer techniques and the slightly nostalgic charm of black-and white photography that enables us to increase the distance between art and reality.” The presentation of their work also resembles the classical medium of photography. By framing their work in historical fashion and protecting the surface with shellac they give their prints the aura of uniqueness, strongly resembling paintings.
Floria Gónzález was born in Monterrey on July 20, 1980n NL, moving to Acuña Coahuila in 1983, moved to Mexico City an age 16 where he lives and works. She studied photography and film in Mexico City and San Antonio, TX. In 2003 she starts working forming two ways; one inside photography and commercial video and the other in art.
These images attempt to express the restless feeling that the place I’m in isn’t where I should be and that the next location will be better. The geographical and temporal reference points in the photographs are blurred because the work isn’t about the location or time, but about a state-of-mind. The work comes from reality, but it’s a reality that’s distorted by subjectivity. It’s an expression of my state of mind during these restless off-moments.
Sylwia Makris is responsible for the photographic realization of the Old Masters project. The Polish photographer began her artistic career as a sculptor before starting to focus on photography in 2007. Through her intense artworks, which have been published in numerous art and fashion magazines, she soon made a name for herself. Her clients include actors and musicians, but also accomplished models, such as Shaun Ross and Melanie Gaydos. Sylwia’s works have an emotional depth which allows the viewer to experience the atmosphere during capture. “A face always tells more, than it knows,” Makris says. “ Photography is never just a capture of what is. It always communicates what has been, what could have been and also the suffering beneath the surface.”
The Old Masters project aims to utilize the capacity inherent in all of us to change and to reevaluate our point of view. We are therefore very pleased to present this ambitious project of Sylwia Makris.
We would also like to thank the Fashiondesigner Nina Athanasiou for creating and providing the costumes.
Old masters’ paintings that have been newly interpreted for this project continue to exert an influence on all of us. Is it possible to freely rediscover universal beauty – if it even exists? This is the question that marks the beginning and end of the Old Masters project. The works shown strive to tackle this question by emphasizing the need for a critical analysis of the often outlandish and exagerrated ideals of beauty of our present times and our society.
The famous painting “Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters,” for example, was recreated for the project with a breast cancer patient after a mastectomy. Models with Down syndrome impressively recreated other famous paintings used for the project. Other participators include the albino models Shaun Ross and Diandra Forrest, the transgender model Garrison Partusch, the completely tattooed Zombie Boy, Melanie Gaydos, who is suffering from a gene defect, collector of morbidities Ryan Matthews and his wife Regina, New York-based influencers like James Gallagher and Brett David, and the model Elliott Sailors, known for her experimentation with gender roles. Berlin and Munich will be represented by David Baum, chief editor of GQ, actress Nora Tschirner, electro visionary DJ Hell, nightlife veterans Frank Künster, Conny Opper and Liz Paige as well as the artist Vera Kochubey, Tanja Siren, Florentine Joop, Tristan Boettcher, author Hasan Cobanli and the siblings Lucas und Frederike von Cranach.
Over a period of one year the picture’s subjects were explored and chosen in close cooperation with the respecive models, in order for them and their personalities to be represented in the best possible way. It is thus no suprise that the selection ranges from Botticelli’s religious motives to Caravaggio, Lucas von Cranach, Gustav Klimt and Hans Baldung Grien.
Joy Goldkind currently resides in St. James, NY. She graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology, NYC in 1963. She has exhibited in numerous venues across the country and internationally including a solo exhibition at the Museo Nationale Della Fotographia in Italy, where a permanent collection of her work is now held. Joy’s photographs have graced the covers of international publications and magazines such as Silver Shotz and Eyemazing. Her work has also been featured in B&W Magazine, Photolife, Zoom Magazine, Color and View Camera Magazine
Como preludio, pese a que yo lo considero irrelevante, diré que estudié Publicidad y que, posteriormente, decidí abandonar ese mundo de un modo absoluto. Ahora tan solo trabajo en lugares que me permitan dedicar mi tiempo mental a lo que a mí me gusta. Me siento más cómodo descargando cajas o cobrando manteles que diseñando logos o charlando en una galería. Y adoro viajar, hasta el punto de que estuve viviendo varios meses en Camboya
Aprendí fotografía, fotomanipulación y dirección de arte de modo autodidacta, basándome en el concepto de “me gustaría plasmar esto, ¿cómo consigo hacerlo?”. Ensayo y error. Horas y horas. Obsesionado con el tenebrismo barroco – Ribera, Caravaggio, Rembrant…, así como con toda una galería de temas fetiche que van desde la mitología de Silent Hill hasta la Cábala judia, plasmo con mis fotos mi cosmogonía personal a base de personajes que, tanto en grupos cohesionados como a en forma de retazos sueltos, cumplen determinados papeles dentro mi ciudad mental personal. Todo es una gran obra de teatro.
Si bien no existe una coherencia geográfica y temporal concreta (no existe nada, más allá de un mismo estilo artístico, que los unifique), he ido profundizando en la idea de las series fotográficas y la reinterpretación. Cada nuevo proyecto, cada nueva serie, supone una implicación con un tema determinado; bien sean los yokai japoneses, el chamanismo prehistórico o las nueve musas griegas, me dedico a bucear entre libros, artículos y piezas artísticas relacionadas con el tema fetiche que me obsesiona en un determinado momento hasta hacerlo parte de mi y poder, de esa forma, reinterpretarlo bajo mi visión.
Mindaugas Gabrenas (1977) is fine art Lithuanian photographer working worldwide.
His series Fantasma (2009) was the first integral photo project with intention to explore the long exposure landscape photography in personal melancholic and apocalyptic way.
In 2011 Gabrenas came back to black&white film photography and started his Dreamscapes series. Working in severe and abandoned locations with long time ago expired soviet Svema films and old light leaking cameras, Gabrenas reflected a black&white surreal dream projection in photography.
Back to the City is the third Gabrenas‘ project, created in US. Here author combines his passion for landscape and cityscape photography by mixing an American wild landscape with New York City cityscape. Presenting works in diptych Gabrenas is trying to reveal unexpected visual parallels between two antagonistic concepts: natura et urbi.
In his fourth and still ongoing project Somnia Gabrenas is back to the theme of dreams, capturing these visions using his handmade medium format film camera and colour films. mostly affected by mold from the dark bread.
Mindaugas Gabrenas is an author of a number of personal and group exhibitions worldwide, his works were published in various photo magazines, in 2014 his works were presented in International Festival of Photography PHotoEspaña (Madrid).
Author currently focuses on 6×6 film photography and works with medium format cameras varying from Hasselblad to plastic homemade. Landscapes, waterscapes, cityscapes and melancholic dreamscapes – are the main fields of his interest.
The name René Maltête is meaningless to most of us, since we don’t often look behind the camera, but he literally altered the way photography was handled, changing the game for good and all. He grew up in the 30’s and 40’s, when most pictures were taken of staid men in severe suits looking sorely unhappy as they stared into the lens of these photographic contraptions, trying not to blur the resultant images. Photos of the era were commonly staged, with little humanity. They were largely glamour shots or grim photos taken for utility. There wasn’t much personality to them, and they certainly weren’t funny. Then came the work of René.
As time progressed and more people could get access to cameras, the technology also became more mobile and less difficult to take out into the world, where life could be more aptly captured outside of staged shoots. Candid photography began to take off, and Maltête decided he wanted to show the hilarity of the human condition, so he made street photos that were odd, quirky, and often gut-busting. Meme-makers of today and those who devise “When You See It…” lists have nothing on the masterwork of this light-bending genius.
