Photographic Visions – Summer 2023
A curated international photography exhibition
July 27 – August 16 (1st session) and August 24 – September 16 (2nd session)
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Photographic Visions is a biannual exhibition at PH21 Gallery, showing mini-series of the works of selected artists who submitted their portfolio for our solo exhibition competition. Our aim is to celebrate the work of photographers whose portfolio is progressive and visionary, forwarding photography in the 21st century.
Photographic Visions – Summer 2023 presents three images (in the form of mini-series) from photographers in two sections.
To find out more about the photographers, please click on their names to visit their websites.
Exhibiting artists:
July 27 – August 16 (1st session)
We like abstraction: pure forms expressing the core qualities of reality. Taking a picture is just the beginning of the path. It is a search for photographic Equivalents in which simple lines form new imagery, which evokes fresh associations and meanings.
We are an award-winning photographic duo from Prague. Our work is based on a body of work from our journeys in the Death Valley and Abu Dhabi deserts.
This work explores the idea that children, with their ability to continue to hope and dream, to use their imaginations to embrace the world and possibility, are the superheroes society needs to grapple with the challenges in front of us. But it also depicts a mother's concern for her children. There is an underlying impotence to their efforts to play at power. In their vulnerability and helplessness, they embody the anxiety of a society on the brink, struggling to believe in the future, unable to confront true accountability for its actions.
[...] Although these three images included in this exhibition appear to be traditional portraiture, they are actually conceptual art. Caught between the real and unreal when interacting with these images of mannequins, the viewer is forced to navigate the distance between their normal human response to these subjects and the inherently inhuman nature of the subjects themselves. "This is not a pipe; this is not a human."
Andrei Kamkov
"Since abstract art has always been of particular interest to me, I have long wanted to find out what the abilities of photography for creating abstract images are. The presented works came into existence as the result of an effort to create images that have no connection with the familiar world."
"Lazdinas images are from the project "Urban Conversations." Urban Conversations offers a unique perspective on city life, highlighting the moments of beauty that often go unnoticed in the hustle and bustle of daily life. Despite intense, ongoing geopolitical and environmental changes, moments of tranquility and awe can emerge when one takes a moment to observe intricate patterns and colors amongst city streets. This series conveys the impressions that emerged from the magnificence of the unseen."
Nature Dead is a laboratory exercise (constructed scene). They are stories created with freezing techniques and vice versa, where I try to recreate situations with a figurative meaning towards death and the processes of that transition, such as the makeup of the deceased. and other postmortem legal process techniques. I try to reflect on the finite resources of life and the planet that hosts us. Could we humans today be a terminal disease for the earth?
Photographing in museums offers the opportunity to come to know the art work more deeply. And, if the image is successful, it also offers something to the artist in return. Just as a literary translator, through mimesis, rewrites and revives another's written words, a photographer who shoots the work in context brings new life to it. These photographs reinterpret the art in museum settings, depicting how the art merges or competes with the architecture and what the art means to me.
Jürgen Pawlik
For years I'm working on the project „Dance“ and it's still ongoing. I like to come close, to capture the in-between, the characters, to feel harmony, interaction, tension or even a certain state of trance. Everything to make photography strong. The series Dorrego represents a good number of this.
These Cyanotype images are from my Identity Series and look symbolically at ways in which identity is defined such as gender, life paths, costume and death. Natural objects add to the mystery of identity.
Szilárd Schlauszky
Solarography is the recording of the Sun's path in the sky, which is possible with a very simple device, a pinhole camera. I make these tools myself trying to learn from experience with regard to both the tools and their setting. When making solar graph images, I try not only to record the Sun's path in the sky, but incorporate typical and interesting things also from the environment. To do so, you often have to place the camera in a place where it can be noticed.
This series is my perception of elements of the urban landscape in a year when the sum of the accumulated negativity set in motion the wheel of time and it turned the world upside down. [...] A square format is a deliberate choice that offers me a visual refuge amidst the chaos that surrounds us. Through the application of the color inversion effect, I unveil a world turned upside down, reflecting the profound impact of war and the disarray that has gripped our planet. The inverted colours become a powerful symbol of the upheaval we face, a visual language that portrays the disorientation and discord that permeate our lives.
August 24 – September 16 (2nd session)
Through The Shards series we searched for the meaning of the Romanian word DOR. Its Latin origin DOLUS means "to hurt". In oral folk lyric it is a frequently encountered symbol and underlies the folk philosophy of soul pain. Involving and enemy of freedom, this soul tension has hints of pain, pleasure, love, aspiration. The pain (DORUL) we experience in the absence of loved ones or the estrangement from childhood places when we become adults. Or the loss of loved ones. In these situations the soul is torn to pieces. [...]
There's no “given,” formula for what demands Eric’s focus as a photographer. Eric is as drawn to the landscapes and neglected towns of the American southwest as he is to the tensions of struggling rustbelt cities in the U.S. northeast. Eric is attracted to objects left behind, especially those that hint at a unique human narrative, a story waiting to be told. Eric’s current work explores one of those relics: working payphones hidden in plain sight throughout the neighborhood near his studio in Rochester, NY. Associates suggested they signified a high crime area. This project's shown Eric something very different.
Thomas Laurence
It begins with countless photons striking an object, to be reflected and passed through the lens to strike a surface put there by the artist. This path becomes a window into the lives of objects, how they show themselves when a camera is turned in their direction. [...] So it is that the photographic print becomes the relived substance of a Thing’s life, pigment and paper forming a thin work of sculpture that hangs before us in three-space made real by new photons on new journeys from surface to retina, where they become signals in their passage to the viewer's brain.
Alain Licari
My photographic work focuses mainly on people and communities who live on the margins of the system or whose daily lives can take on a universal value.
My photographic approach is similar to that of a documentary. I usually explore a subject from different angles and I use to observe its evolution over time. But I also strive to produce aesthetically and pleasing photography, paying particular attention to framing and composition, often inspired by the cinema".
Then for over fifty years I have continued exploring the theme of the NUDE with different techniques, processes and cameras. [...] Around 2018 I began to explore the cell phone camera. The cell phone camera made making an image very spontaneous. I could make about fifty images in the time it would take to make one pinhole camera image.I would look at the images that I had captured and seek 9 that made a sequence and had a relationship.
The three works presented are from the series 'Eros and Thanatos'. It is one segment of a larger, ongoing series exploring the Jungian Archetype of the 'The Shadow Self'- the hidden, dark, repressed ideas, desires, and instincts of the unconscious mind. ‘Eros and Thanatos’ explores the unconscious processes residing at intersection of sex and death, how they govern and impact our lives and how they shape our destiny.
Dai Nakamura
I don't know of any tree other than cherry blossoms that appeals to people's hearts even after they have fallen. Is this feeling peculiar to Japanese people? This tree has been deeply involved in the history of the common people in Japan, and has been improved and maintained by many Japanese hands. I created this series with a strong sense of Japanese wabi-sabi in the moment when the cherry blossoms and nature intersect. This is an attempt to embody the Japanese wabi-sabi that dwells in a single falling SAKURA petal.
Nancy Oliveri
My first visit to Iceland was exactly as I remembered it, a confrontation with the mystery of the earth as a primal living organism, a landscape of ancient moss covered lava fields and healing geothermal springs. I use photography to experience the history, geography, energy and spirit and of a place. Here I photographed local models, women in caves as integrated into the earth with animal skin and dirt while they told tales about the invisible elf like Huldufolk or Hidden People of Icelandic folklore. They live in a parallel world and make themselves visible at will.
From randomness you were constructed, and to randomness you shall return. No matter how unstructured and chaotic our lives, our lives are our salvation from pervasive and enduring chaos. Life is structure. Our bodies are structures. We build structures that we can depend upon—bridges, buildings, machines and communities. All structures deteriorate and are abandoned or lost. Reassembling the cells takes them out of context, isolates them, and further emphasizes the finiteness associated with photography and with life.
As a contemporary photographer with an interest in shooting both urban and natural landscapes, I make a point of keeping my images almost or totally uninhabited as I consider people to be but one part of the world as opposed to being its centre. Even in my pictures of architecture, obviously built by people for other people to use, I am fascinated by the space and its details rather than its occupants. Juxtapositions, interactions and contradictions, rhythms and rhymes – be they intended or otherwise – is what I never stop looking for in nature and cities.