Maroesjka Lavigne (b.1989, Belgium) gained her Masters in Photography at Ghent University in the summer of 2012 in Belgium. Her work has been shown internationally at the Foam Talent exhibition in Amsterdam, The Robert Mann Gallery in New York, Galerie Hug in Paris and Museum Saint Guislain in Gent, Belgium, among others. She self-published a book called ‘ísland’ in 2012 that sold out. Her latest project ‘Lost Lands’ was recently exhibited in the Robert Mann Gallery in New York. Her latest monograph book ‘Someone, Somewhere, Sometime’ contains her 4 previous projects and is copublished by Radius Books and Robert Mann Gallery
She was selected for the Talent Call at Fotomuseum Amsterdam (FOAM) Netherlands 2012 and was the winner of the Emerging Talent competition of Lensculture in 2014 with the series ‘You are More than beautiful’. In 2015 she won the Harry Penningsprijs in Eindhoven, Netherlands and in 2016 she won 1st place in the Landscape Category at the Sony World Photography Awards with her project Land of Nothingness. She is currently living and working in Ghent, Belgium.
David Van Dartel - From an early age I have been fascinated by the Dutch Islands. As a family, we used to visit them often and eventually, Vlieland would become a particular place of interest for me. The island offers a stunning scenery, giving one a sense of discovery and the ultimate adventure. Something that, in hindsight I believe, has always appealed to me. The Islands isolated location, you have to cross the sea, represents a feeling of wilderness, a perfect place to project all of my fantasies onto.
After "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue - Jeff Wall (Canadian, born 1946)
Jeff Wall based this elaborately stagedphotographon the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s celebrated 1952 novel,Invisible Man. The novel’s protagonist, an unnamed African American man, relates that he lives secretly “in my hole in the basement,” where he has “wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it” with 1,369 lights powered by illegally siphoned off electricity. In addition to the prologue, Wall drew from other parts ofInvisible Manand his own imagination to create thisscene. His intention was not to make a literal illustration of the text, but to giveformto the picture it inspired in his mind, which he calls “accidents of reading.” As he has explained, many of hisimagesbegin “from accidents in the street—events I witnessed by chance. These pictures are like that, except that the accident occurred when I happened to be reading a book. I had the same feeling reading […] that I have had many times when seeing something occur on the street or in some other place, a feeling that an opportunity for a picture was presented to me."
Wall refers to his method of photography as “cinematography.” Similar to the process of making a movie, his work is dependent on collaboration with a cast and assistants who help him to develop his painstakingly constructed sets. He uses a large-format camera with a telephoto lens to achieve the high resolution and fine details that characterize his prints. This photograph, like most of the artist’s work, has been printed on a transparency and mounted in a steel-framed light box. The large-scaleimage is illuminated from behind by fluorescent lights, which Wall began utilizing after seeing light-box advertisements in the late 1970s.
René Groebli (born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1927) secured his place among the elite of Swiss post-war photographers with his 1949 portfolio MAGIE DER SCHIENE (RAIL MAGIC). In the early fifties Groebli worked as reporter for Life, Picture Post and other international magazines. During the following years he owned a studio for industrial and advertising photography. In 1957 the American Color Annual named him MASTER OF COLOR.
In the early 80s Groebli stopped working for advertising and rediscovered for himself the possibilities of expression that black & white photography offers. In 1999 the Zurich Kunsthaus (Art Museum) showed a representative selection of his photographs from the years 1946 to 1996.
Rahim Fortune (b.1994) was raised in Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. His documentary photo practice focuses on culture, geography and self expression in the American landscape. He currently lives and works between Austin Texas and Brooklyn NY.
Ross has been called one of the greatest portrait photographers in the history of the medium. As a long-overdue retrospective opens in Europe, a new generation will witness her radical belief in the individual.
I walk the streets of New York City and photograph strangers. Serendipity, evanescence, a deep respect for and affirmation of the world as encountered: these are the elements that are essential to my approach. The scope of my photos is narrow and mundane, like the lives they depict – like the lives of most of us. But I seek glimpses of transcendence in the mundane. I am interested in fleeting gestures and glances, moments of connection in the urban flow, the ephemeral dance of light and shadow and street life. More than anything, what moves me is capturing the infinitesimal outward signs of an inner emotional life, the interiority of people even in the midst of the most public of spaces. My photographs are relics of a momentary merging of photographer and environment, subject and object. The city brings us together, the city prizes us apart. Immersing myself in the flow of the life of the city I feel the boundaries of my self momentarily become fluid, permeable. I abandon myself to the flow. These photographs are as much portraits of individual people as they are portraits of moments of being. They are my feeble protest against the city’s forgetfulness.
Dimitri Mellos - For most people, the idea of Greece evokes either images of sunny beaches and picturesque whitewashed villages, or, more recently, depictions of the financial crisis or tragic images of refugees trying to cross over to Europe. With this project, my aim has been to deconstruct and undermine, but also expand and enrich, the set of visual representations associated with my country of birth in our collective imagination. I attempted to capture an aspect of Greece's landscape that is very far removed from the typical picture-postcard aesthetic usually associated with the country. I also wanted to evoke what I think of as the often improvised, play-it-by ear character of that part of the world: the somewhat laissez-faire attitude of Greeks toward their lived environment, which gives rise to an interesting and delicate interplay and inter-permeability between public and private spaces in Greece. Often, objects that would seem to have no place in the midst of nature are found scattered through the landscape. I think there is something deeply sad and surreal, and sometimes even almost cruel (but at other times very tender) about these traces of human presence in the middle of nowhere.
Eikoh Hosoe (細江 英公, Hosoe Eikō, born 18 March 1933 in Yonezawa, Yamagata) is a Japanese photographer and filmmaker who emerged in the experimental arts movement of post-World War II Japan. He is known for his psychologically charged images, often exploring subjects such as death, erotic obsession, and irrationality. Through his friendships and artistic collaborations he is linked with the writer Yukio Mishima and 1960s avant-garde artists such as the dancer Tatsumi Hijikata.
