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First steps, first words, first day of school, first sleepover, first kiss, first car-adulthood. When we are children, time stretches onward indefinitely; many of us spend countless hours thinking, "I can't wait 'til I'm old enough to..." Yet from the outside, this precious period passes by in a blink of an eye.

These seven projects-in wonderfully varied ways and visual languages-tell different stories of growing up. Some of these views are romantic, others are gritty and real, yet all of them share insights into that delicate time that we get to experience directly just once...enjoy!

- The editors of LensCulture

Cut It Short
Two teen boys in Poland - Dominik and Marek - are inseparable friends as they "come of age", discovering sex, travel, adventure, and the follies of fashion. By Michal Solarski and Tomasz Liboska.

Documenting the delicate, turbulent stages of adolescence through intimate portraits of her own children's lives. By Martine Fougeron.

The Middle of Somewhere
A celebration of childhood and family life through a collection of simple yet beautiful moments of two sisters growing up in the remote Australian wilderness. By Sam Harris.

A kind, lovely 11-year old girl entrenched in the poverty and trauma of one of Sao Paulo's worst slums. Her possible way out? The "Young Miss Brazil" beauty pageant. By Luisa Dorr.

My Last Day at 17
Rich portraits of teenagers in Ireland coming of age - as individuals, as groups, as part of a community and as the new generation of Irish. By Doug DuBois.

Tractor Boys
Young teenage boys in rural Sweden have a ritual of gathering together in a large deserted field at night drive souped-up old cars at crazy speeds. A charged, yet sensitive, meditation on youth. By Martin Bogren.

Julia Wannabe
A photographic collaboration between a mother and her daughter, as the daughter transitions from being a girl to a young woman. By Anna Grzelewska.

You can also share your story by submitting your best photo narratives to the LensCulture Visual Storytelling Awards 2019. The deadline is December 19, 2018.

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I Won't Grow Up: 7 Photo Stories Capture Adolescence - Chosen by the LensCulture Editors | LensCulture

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First steps, first words, first day of school, first sleepover, first kiss, first car-adulthood. When we are children, time stretches onward indefinitely; many of us spend countless hours thinking, "I can't wait 'til I'm old enough to..." Yet from the outside, this precious period passes by in a blink of an eye.

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209 female MPs by 209 female photographers - in pictures

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To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first election in which some women and all men could vote, 209 female photographers have taken portraits of the 209 women MPs in the UK parliament

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Brightly coloured building- great experimentation inspo

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Photo essay: keen to embark on career in architecture, young German student Paul Eis has been documenting the buildings of Berlin and Hamburg, but adapting them with bright colours (+ slideshow).

Eis, 18, uses the Instagram account the_architecture_photographer, to present his images, which have all been stripped of their context, updated with a new colour palette and superimposed over a vibrant blue backdrop.

He hopes the series will help show there is more to these cities than white and grey facades, and believes the addition of colour can help to highlight the interesting and unique qualities of buildings ranging from Walter Gropius' Bauhaus Archive to Frank Gehry's DZ Bank.

In a text written exclusively for Dezeen, he explains the purpose of the project.

I started my Instagram project in the summer of 2015, but I have been interested in architecture and buildings since before I can remember. When I finish school this year - the same school Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius went to - I want to study architecture.

With my photographs, I initially wanted to focus more on the buildings than on the technique of picturing them in the most spectacular way. But in a city like Berlin, sites that are both interesting and offer a pure view are very rare.

After photographing a few famous backyards and underground stations, I started to get bored. There is also distinct lack of colour in Berlin's modern architecture. So I started giving the buildings new colours.

The first objects I did this to were some of the typical socialist housing estates in east Berlin - buildings with very strong rectangular shapes and clean geometries. Fascinated by these minimal designs, I thought some colour could make these monotonous white or grey structures more interesting.
I started to get bored, so I started giving the buildings new colours
In the beginning I just coloured in pictures of straight facades, transforming them into vibrant, geometric structures. Later I started adding whole buildings to the series, and starting including contemporary buildings from Berlin and Hamburg. I also added social housing estates in west Berlin. Although the design of these homes is not that spectacular, buildings by architects like Gropius fascinate me with their clean lines and gigantic proportions.

All my images, except the full-sized facades, have a uniformly blue background. The blue acts as a characterising property and it focuses the viewer's eyes on the building itself, creating contrast between the colours I apply and the white areas I leave. I like to think this is comparable with the gold backgrounds that paintings from the Middle Ages often have.
Cutting the building out of its environment makes it appear more monumental
When colouring buildings, I orientate mainly towards characteristic elements like balconies or windows. Sometimes, when the buildings already have some colours, I include them in my images. The colour palette is intended to be either purely complementary, rich in contrast, or to define a colour gradient. But I always use at least one colour that suits the background. Also, the order of the colours in each image depends on the building's structure. When the building has a clean geometry, I order the colours in a somehow repeating way. But when it has a random structure, I usually choose a more random order of colours.

Nicolas Grospierre's Modern Forms series is an "atlas" of decaying Modernism

The method of photographing is also very important for me. Shooting with a wide angle lens gives the image a sense of depth, but keeping the vertical lines straight allows it to be appear very stoic. I do this by applying perspective correction in the post-production stage. Cutting the building out of its environment makes it appear more monumental, standing alone in an undefined landscape with no other object in correspondence.

The project could be seen as a way of showing how much of Berlin and Hamburg's architecture can be understood as artwork. Buildings should not be defined by shape only - but it is hard when so much of the architecture in Germany is grey. Adding colours helps to highlight how interesting and unique these buildings are.

For example, the Uhl64 building by Raumpool Architekten - a modern white corner house - is by no means ugly in reality, but it is also not really special. Adding colour to the window dividers gives it a completely new lively look.
Adding colours helps to highlight how interesting and unique these buildings are
Meanwhile, the Marcopolo Tower in HafenCity Hamburg is a good example of when white facades were the wrong solution. After just a few years, the former white facade of the Marcopolo Tower has grey areas that make it look dirty.

My project is not meant to be a critique on modern architecture, but maybe instead on the rise of boring housing estates. Because of the housing market in Berlin, it is hard to understand why companies take so little care in creating good architecture. Maybe it is the mentality of the buyers or just a lack of interest in architecture. I do not know. But it hurts me every time I see new buildings that seem so dull and I know will look ugly in just a few years, especially when their white facades start to get dirty.

Some of my coloured buildings feel utopian as well. In reality the colours would probably become just as dull as the white, but in my opinion they are a way of making the cityscape more interesting.

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Paul Eis gives colourful makeover to German city architecture

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Photo essay: keen to embark on career in architecture, young German student Paul Eis has been documenting the buildings of Berlin and Hamburg, but adapting them with bright colours (+ slideshow). Eis, 18, uses the Instagram account the_architecture_photographer, to present his images, which have all been stripped of their context, updated with a new colour palette and superimposed over a vibrant blue backdrop.

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Candy coloured signs, abstracted architecture shot from below

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Purchase colorful prints from Matt Crump, the candy-colored minimalist.

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Abstract, angular, colourful

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Paolo Pettigiani Photography | SHAPEGUARD

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A bee hive with a lot of colourful boxes? A collection of mailboxes in a multi-family dwelling? A photograph in the tradition of serial art? Or a score, based on the model of the "synaesthetic" keyboard of Alexander Skrjabins? The first associations you experience when you look at the Compositions are not so far off.

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Beautiful colours and use of angles

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Very abstract approach

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My passion for architecture photography originated from my studies in architecture mixed with my curiosity for urban exploration. Having in your backyard, is like a playground when it comes to architecture photography. And so it is no surprise that when I got my first camera I would travel to Chicago every weekend and photograph everything I saw. Although I enjoyed taking pictures of landscape, nature and concert, nothing seemed to be as powerful to me as my pictures of looking up as the Chicago architecture swallowed me. It may be the scale of the buildings that first drew me in but I've been exploring architecture photography ever since. From walking into the Disney Music Concert Hall to the strolling down the streets of downtown Reykjavik in to exploring Chicago's , I never know what to expect; but it seems like at every corner I turn, there's always a new surprise. From the towering facades to the historic architecture, the power of architecture, not only of Chicago but cities across the world, seems endless. I hope to visit and explore more through photography of the worlds built environment and the details that some of the most creative minds have not only envisioned but has brought to life.

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My passion for architecture photography originated from my studies in architecture mixed with my curiosity for urban exploration. Having in your backyard, is like a playground when it comes to architecture photography. And so it is no surprise that when I got my first camera I would travel to Chicago every weekend and photograph everything I saw.

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Architectural photographer, documenting, imaging, and interpreting architecture, design, and the built environment

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also includes cross processing

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Matthew Brandt - River and Sky | LensCulture

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Matthew Brandt River and Sky November 3, 2016 - January 21, 2017 Artist's Reception: Thursday, November 3, 6:00 - 8:00pm Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Matthew Brandt, on view from November 3, 2016, through January 21, 2017, with a reception for the artist on Thursday, November 3 from 6:00 - 8:00pm.

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A wave licking the shore of a beach, a snow-capped mountain peak, jagged rock formations-the monochrome landscapes of Dominique Teufen feel both mysterious and familiar at the same time. They are vistas that we have all seen before: beautiful landscapes and natural phenomena from books and magazines that we dream of travelling to, but will probably never reach. But on closer inspection, we realize that Teufen never made the journey either. Her expedition around the world was actually a journey through her imagination. It actually took place in her studio, using a standard photocopy machine as her vehicle.

Inspired by the snow-covered expanses of Antarctica, the picturesque hills of China and the rugged fjords of Norway, Teufen's delicate topographies are carefully crafted by hand using a range of unexpected materials. "Starting with crumpled paper, deformed plastic, plexiglas and foils, to flour, cotton wool and coffee grounds, a variety of materials are placed on the copy machine. The exposure is then controlled by the manipulation of the lid of the copy machine," she explains. "In the process, these materials transform into moonlit, snow-covered mountain slopes, huge rock formations, cloudy hilly landscapes or, for example, a reflective and moving water surface with a striking coastal silhouette."

With a background in sculpture and stone carving, materiality is a primary concern for Teufen, whose work oscillates between 2D and 3D. Using the scenic photographs that make up our collective perception of a place as a starting point for the journey, she then physically builds new worlds, only to flatten them back out in the photocopy machine. The final image is a photograph of the resulting sculptural arrangement, which Teufen believes transforms her imaginary landscapes into "a possible reality." Existing somewhere between reality and illusion, the images play with our perception, first seducing and then deceiving. Teufen concludes, "The imposing mountain range turns out to be a trivial thin silk paper piece, the idyllic beach a thin plastic bag and the impressive glacier as a mere queuing of cotton balls."

Editor's Note: Dominique Teufen is one of our new LensCulture Emerging Talents 2018. Check out the amazing work of the other finalists here.

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My Travel Through the World on My Copy Machine - Photographs by Dominique Teufen | Essay by Sophie Wright | LensCulture

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A wave licking the shore of a beach, a snow-capped mountain peak, jagged rock formations-the monochrome landscapes of Dominique Teufen feel both mysterious and familiar at the same time. They are vistas that we have all seen before: beautiful landscapes and natural phenomena from books and magazines that we dream of travelling to, but will probably never reach.

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Metamorphosis - Photographs by Lois Cohen and Indiana Roma Voss | Essay by Sophie Wright | LensCulture

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Photographer Lois Cohen and stylist Indiana Roma Voss reimagine female archetypes from across history as new, empowered icons for the 21st-century woman

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Flowers for Lisa - Photographs by Abelardo Morell | LensCulture

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In his latest series, Abelardo Morell takes a traditional still life subject — a vase of flowers — and pushes and pulls it well beyond the typical boundaries of that genre, with endlessly delightful results

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While formal training in photography is often necessary to provide a foundational understanding of the medium, it can also box creativity in, so that artists focus on imitation more than their own unique artistic expression. It's easy to become consumed with finding the tiniest flaw or inconsistency, rather than reflecting on personal growth and self-expression.

For photographer Zak Dimitrov, this controlled practice proved incredibly frustrating, to the point where he began destroying the negatives of his own images in order to overcome his irritation with them. Dimitrov soon realized that his chemical destructions situated his work within a new photographic realm - one that altered each infuriating image into a new work of art, brought to life through vibrant chemical reactions. The resulting images are part of his ongoing series Ruptured, which he adds to each week.

In this interview, Dimitrov speaks to LensCulture about the process of experimentation, how his work has evolved into a long-term, fulfilling project, and why it's important to trust your intuition in your creative process.

LensCulture: Your work can be described as a sort of intentional accident. You put the images through chemical alterations by selecting which elements interact with each photograph. When did you start experimenting with chemicals in this way in the darkroom?

Zak Dimitrov: When I started working in the darkroom, I was making standard 8x10 prints, portraits, and images of architecture, trying out a bit of everything. Over time, I started experimenting with stuff like liquid light and other components, and that's when I realized that photography doesn't actually have to be a picture on paper. I started printing on things like t-shirts and paper plates, experimenting with the possibilities of what the definition of a photography can be. But I still felt like there was a disconnect with my images, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out.

LC: After beginning with this more traditional practice and then shifting into different printing methods, how did you start making Ruptured? Was there something in particular that inspired the work?

ZD: When I graduated from university and started working, I was really struggling to come up with a project to fulfill my creative side. I get really, really frustrated with most of my photographs, because as soon as I look at them, I only see their imperfections and instantly don't like them. So in a way, I started making the pieces in Ruptured to destroy those photographs and express my frustration with them. I wanted to channel this frustration that came out of thinking about myself as a bad photographer.

Making this work eliminates my obsession with finding those flaws. It's like when you scan an image and you have a bit of dust on the scanner bed, and you look at the scan, see the fleck, and get incredibly annoyed. But with this work, when I have that dust, it's all part of the process and I can embrace it. It's about freeing myself from the possibilities of making a mistake.

LC: Walk me through how you make these images. Do you start with the negatives?

ZD: A lot of my latest photographs are made with a medium format camera, so those are the negatives I'm working with at the moment. I bleach and scratch them, and I also pour caustic soda on them, and then I scan them. But before I transitioned to destroying my own images, I started with other pictures that really, really annoyed me - ones that I don't think should exist, like cute smiling babies and sunsets. All the cheesy touristy stuff. I work at a print shop, so I have access to a lot of that imagery.

Then I began incorporating more personal photographs, like images of family members and friends. This work is in a constant state of transition, so those are the images I'm working with the most now, and I'm thinking about taking this even further by altering a series of self portraits.

LC: I'm sure working with these chemicals was a massive learning process, especially for determining what effects you like the most through constant trial and error. What are some particular outcomes you've noticed throughout this experimentation?

ZD: I first experimented to figure out if it's best so scratch the image and then bleach it, or vice versa. When you start with bleach and scratch afterwards, the scratches end up a bit more pronounced, which I don't really like. But if you scratch it first, the bleach actually gets into those divots and it looks a bit more 3D, like scratched skin. After I had a good handle on that method, I started using caustic soda, which creates crystals on the negative that are shaped like little crosses. And when these crystals interact with the emulsion, they create other interesting shapes, which I love.

LC: Because this work is very experimental, I'm wondering what kind of environment you have to be in when you're making each image. Do you need total silence, or is the opposite?

ZD: It used to be the case that silence did not work for me - it had to be the total opposite. I usually make these pieces on Saturdays, and I play classical music to put me into this zone to start the scratching and bleaching. But now, the scratching itself usually takes me about five hours, and it's quite meditative. A lot of time can pass before I realize that I have been in complete silence. I find that process really relaxing. But for the bleaching, when I'm playing around with the emulsion and shifting things to drip a certain way or fold in a particular direction, I definitely need to listen to music.

LC: The colors you manage to achieve with these chemicals are really vibrant. How do you create these lively green and fiery hues?

ZD: It's all about the chemical reaction. I get the really bright colors on the negative with the caustic soda, which I often mix with the bleach or vinegar. When you use bleach, you only get red and orange, but the caustic soda is what creates the green. I love bringing both together in a single print.

LC: Tell me a bit about the title Ruptured. It's obviously quite literal, but I also find it very theatrical. Why did you choose this word to represent this work?

ZD: Because I'm working with pictures that really frustrate me, I wanted to reference that somehow. It's a strong word, and I am tearing at the surfaces of these photographs, so it kind of addresses my relationship to the images while also addressing the literal rupturing of the photograph's surface.

LC: Since this work is so dynamic, different viewers can really bring their own reactions to each piece. What have been some of your favourite interpretations of it?

ZD: Every single person who has seen this work has a different association with it, and I love that. There's an image of an older woman with a large black hole on her face, and the person who acquired this print spun it upside down because she saw something totally different. Where I might see something more abstract, others see more literal images, and vice versa - and I really love hearing about these different perspectives. It can be whatever you see in it!

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Ruptured - Interview by Cat Lachowskyj | LensCulture

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While formal training in photography is often necessary to provide a foundational understanding of the medium, it can also box creativity in, so that artists focus on imitation more than their own unique artistic expression. It's easy to become consumed with finding the tiniest flaw or inconsistency, rather than reflecting on personal growth and self-expression.

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"I began taking a lot of photographs about two years ago. I felt the distinct need to record as much of the information around me as I possibly could, not just as an aide memoire but also as a way to hold onto things that kept disappearing on me.

"I discovered the ShakeItPhoto App on the iPhone that takes a simulated Polaroid photograph that is, in my opinion, better than the original Polaroid, which, if anyone really remembers were very hit and miss. This was part of the original Polaroid's charm, I know, but impossibly impractical when you are taking as many photographs as I am.

" Another Man asked me to choose a small selection of my photographs and write a paragraph about each one. I have done this and paired them into couples for some playful counterpoint. Many of the photos and the little stories concern my wife, Susie, because like my highly visual songs, I am recording what I see and it seems that much of my life circles around her. It is the seeing, both in my songs and the photographs, that is so important to me." - Nick Cave

The A/W18 'Romance and Ritual' issue of Another Man is out now. Buy a copy here.

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Nick Cave Shares Polaroids Offering a Glimpse Into His Inner World

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"I began taking a lot of photographs about two years ago. I felt the distinct need to record as much of the information around me as I possibly could, not just as an aide memoire but also as a way to hold onto things that kept disappearing on me.

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Shape of Light | Exhibition catalogues | Tate Shop | Tate

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Accompanying exhibition book for the Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art exhibition at Tate Modern, available from Tate Shop.

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Katie Bret Day, chosen by Tom Hunter

"It's a publisher's idea of hell," laughs Tom Hunter, the renowned British artist-photographer best known for his staged tableaux referencing old master paintings. He's talking about Lacuna, an extraordinary new photography book by 25-year-old Londoner Katie Bret Day. "Usually, photographers try to make books as cheaply as possible, as many as possible, then get rid of them and make a profit. Whereas she's hand-stitching all these things together, hand-printing every picture. When you pick it up, you're really intrigued by it: what is this? It breaks all the conventions. It sets up a whole new language."

Bret Day brings along a copy of Lacuna - one of just 50 - when we meet at a cafe in Hackney. It's a busy week for her. She's getting ready for a show at Photofusion gallery in Brixton, south London, her biggest to date, and has recently got back from Switzerland, where she was artist-in-residence at the Institut Le Rosey for a year. Meanwhile, she's about to start a photography MA at the Royal College of Art, continuing a fascination that began when she first picked up a camera at the age of 10.

" Man Ray is the obvious one," she says when I ask about her influences. "He was one of the triggers for me getting into the darkroom and thinking: this is so cool, it's way more than just clicking the shutter." The darkroom remains a central part of Bret Day's practice - she's fascinated by what happens when traditional printing methods are brought to bear on photographs that are taken digitally. Much of this she does at home, with basic developing kit and a blackout blind. "I really like being able to have an idea and execute it immediately," she says. "And also not having to go out and spend a fortune."

Hunter, who taught Bret Day at London College of Communication, is impressed by her approach. "Katie's part of that generation that's bored of Photoshop, that wants to get their hands dirty and really explore the medium for themselves, not just touching buttons on a screen," he says.

Lacuna has taken her more than a year to put together and, flicking through it, I begin to appreciate why. This is no straightforward collection of photographs: the materiality of the text is just as important as the images. The first thing you notice is the variety of surfaces Bret Day has used, including tracing-paper, mirrors and sheets of acetate, which can be lifted to reveal a variant image underneath.

On one page, a partial image of a face - Bret Day's own - is meshed with thick scar-like lines, as if the photograph has been torn up and reassembled to accentuate the ruptures. "This is printed on an emulsion-coated acetate with watercolours added on top," she says. The lines across the face could be seen as a net, conveying an idea of entrapment - a recurring theme in the book - or, Bret Day suggests, you could view them as human cells, a reminder of "how we're made up of many different things".

She's fascinated by human physicality, and her photographs have a visceral quality that can be quite unsettling. When it came to shooting Lacuna, which is full of disembodied heads and headless torsos, she used the closest model to hand: herself. "At university, I became aware of what it means to be photographing other women and what it means to be a woman photographer," she says. "By using myself, I'm trying to gain complete control of that gaze, that body, that image. It strengthens my voice."

"She's exploring her sexuality and body image but she's doing it for the female gaze," says Hunter. "She's not letting men tell her how to present herself. Some of the pictures are incredibly beautiful, almost sexual, but at the same time they're really disturbing. She's ripping the sugary gloss off female portraiture." Killian Fox
Interventions & Interruptions, a group show featuring work by Katie Bret Day, is at Photo fusion, London until 16 Nov
Mayank Austen Soofi, chosen by Dayanita Singh

Even Mayank Austen Soofi's name is an "art work", enthuses the acclaimed photographer Dayanita Singh, as she praises the 38-year-old photographer/writer (aka thedelhiwalla) who has made Delhi his subject on Instagram - his sympathetic, witty posts (topping 20,000) as regular as daily bread. "Ask him about his name," she urges.

"Mayank means 'moon' in Sanskrit," he begins. "It is the name my parents gave me."

His childhood was privileged, his father a government engineer who worked all over Uttar Pradesh. Everyone in his family proved engineer material except Mayank himself (who still wakes "in a sweat" dreaming of maths lessons). Rebelling against his family's expectations, he found work as a waiter at the Radisson Blu in Delhi and lived in a slum behind the hotel. That was 12 years ago, and a desperate time - he was close to suicidal.

But then, in 2007, Mayank started a blog: his first picture was of a funeral procession "from old Delhi to a new part of the city" in mid-winter. It was a moment in which "nothing happened, yet so many things did". He was "very moved" to witness the final journey of a stranger, and caught the horse-driven cortege on camera. Taking photographs is "like reading", he says: you see the story.

Austen, the second part of his name, is a homage: "because of my love for Jane". Literature, he says, saved - saves - him: "Books give you joy and oxygen." Other literary idols include Emily Dickinson and Marcel Proust. But it is to a living novelist, Arundhati Roy, that he is most indebted - his cover photo for her bestseller The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, of a white marble grave with faded rose and dead fly as ornaments, was his first conspicuous coup. The day we speak, he is celebrating the appearance of his portrait of Arundhati Roy on her next book, My Seditious Heart.

Singh - best known for her beautiful photo-books exploring the poetic possibilities of sequencing - makes huge claims for Soofi, believing he is redefining photography itself: "He is blurring the lines of what we think of as a photograph - more than he realises. He is Delhi's self-appointed archivist."

Every day he takes numerous photographs - images of every section of society -on his iPhone8 Plus and often uploads them directly onto Instagram with captions. Today, his pictures include a man sleeping on his hands and on his flip-flops; a ragged, flowery sofa he playfully suggests might have belonged to Emily Dickinson; a little Indian girl, pensively grooming a Barbie doll, captioned Her Experiments with the Caucasian World. As Singh observes: "You never feel he is sneaking up on people; there is always a connection." What makes him original is, in part, that his hyperlocal narrative is ongoing, unending. It is missing the point, Singh argues, to single out particular works to praise.

Soofi's work is characterised by such affectionate, humorous solidarity that it comes as a surprise when he declares Delhi to be a "terrible" city. "I walk in the early morning and late into the night. You pass through many continents in a single day, you see all aspects of the street and its inequalities." As we discuss one image, The Hawker of Other People's Happiness, of a street trader standing stoically with a bicycle loaded with hessian bags and a handful of red, yellow and lime-green helium balloons above his head, he says the city is full of people who do not choose what they do.

Soofi himself is not among their number. Every day, he writes a story about Delhi for Hindustan Times ("I don't know who gets space like this!" Singh exclaims). He worries that the stories might dry up, but they never do. Nor does he: his engaged, engaging torrent of talk is as beguiling as his writing. He is not ambitious, yet when the server for his blog temporarily crashed, in 2015, he found it "tragic, like losing a close friend".

He enjoys Delhi's literary mafia, comparing its "bitchy gossip" to a Proustian salon, but remains apart from it. He is, Singh implies, an independent spirit. And that brings us to his last name, Soofi.
Mayank Austen S oofi will appear in an exhibition curated by the artist Subodh Gupta, featuring 10 artists from across the world, as part of the Serendipity Arts Festival, 15-22 December, Panaji, Goa
"I love the Sufi shrine in Delhi of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, a 14-century saint. I feel at home when I lounge in its courtyard."

For Mayank Austen Soofi is street-spiritual as well as funny, engaging and wise. Kate Kellaway

Nathaniel Grann, chosen by Alec Soth

Pop culture hasn't traditionally been kind to the American midwest. Lacking the romantic grit of New York and the light-dappled glamour of Los Angeles, the vast expanse of country from Ohio to Nebraska often gets a raw deal, lumped together as a homogenous bloc of flyover states synonymous with rural conservatism and Roseanne Barr.

"There are a lot of preconceptions about the midwest," says Nathaniel Grann, "which is crazy because it's so huge." The 28-year-old photographer grew up "in the middle of nowhere" in Minnesota and his beautifully understated photography project Midwest Sentimental serves as both an exploration of the notion of family - quiet domestic dramas, compelling portraits of his own parents - and an affirmation of what that means in small-town America.

"I've always been fascinated by folklore," says Grann, going on to explain the appeal of Minnesota's folk hero lumberjack Paul Bunyan as analogous to his own work. "Even though it ends up being a myth, it's also very much a type of self-fulfilling prophesy."

In the case of Midwest Sentimental, which Grann shot on film over three years, nostalgia creeps through in both the set-ups and the style: a cousin's "man cave" accented with deer heads, a bulky TV flashing grey fuzz, Grann's father snoozing on a velvet La-Z-Boy.

Alec Soth, the revered American photographer and fellow Minnesota native who made his name with his 2004 book Sleeping by the Mississippi, was drawn to Grann's eye for "subverting banal cliche" and rendering it "compelling, quiet - it's understated but it works hard". The pair met when Soth visited the University of Hartford in Connecticut, where Grann was studying, as a guest lecturer on the photography MFA. Soth, much like the late photojournalist Michel du Cille, who hired Grann as a picture editor when he was director of photography at the Washington Post, has been key to encouraging him to pursue his ambition.

"I was lucky they told me to keep going despite the harsh environment for [aspiring] photographers trying to make a living. That Michel du Cille saw talent in me, even getting acknowledged by someone like him - a Pulitzer winner - and knowing he had my back was so great, particularly in those years after school, when you're figuring out the whole hustle."

Grann shot more than 6,500 photos for Midwestern Sentimental, of which 36 made the final edit for the book. "My stepmom first taught me to use a camera when I was around nine," he says. "She was a nature photographer; she got me interested and I would use her Nikon F4." In high school, Grann developed a thing about war photographers - "I very much had that activist notion of how photos can change the world" - but it was time studying at the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Aarhus that proved the real "gamechanger" for him.

"I was studying as [an undergraduate] at the Corcoran College of Arts & Design in [Washington] DC and had learned a lot of different ways to tell a story, but Danish photographers take a different approach to journalism and documentary photography and it allowed me to really try out new things and not be limited."

The Danish experience inspired him to slow down, which became essential to the tone and "a lot of the self-reflection" that came from spending three years observing and shooting his own family.

"One of my approaches was staged portraits, which, clearly, are give-and-take situations with family members." Patience and understanding were needed on both sides of the camera to make his images work. "I have a very early memory of my mother in a fur coat and of her carrying me in it through the snow, but my take on that coat was completely different from my mother's. She remembered it as a leftover from the end of her divorce."

Grann's parents both remarried and the elements of his blended families have become central to his work. Eighteen months ago, he moved to Los Angeles and has been working in the day as a picture editor. "I always joked the project would only come to an end when I moved out of my mom's basement," he laughs. "But there is something to be said about the perpetual summer of California." Nosheen Iqbal

Phoebe Kiely, chosen by Vanessa Winship

Phoebe Kiely is at a "weird crossroads" in her life. The 27-year-old photographer from rural Lincolnshire quit her retail job in Manchester in June, moved away from the city and has since been travelling. During this time she has photographed Glasgow, Verona, Sicily ("I wanted to be by the water"), and is now stationed in Budapest until the end of the year, where she is relishing the city's green spaces and pastel colours.

Before this odyssey, Kiely's subjects were rather more monochrome: her first book, They Were My Landscape, published in May by MACK, is a collection of elegiac black-and-white photographs, named after a quote in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. They capture a range of urban scenes - a young man smoking at a bus stop, cracked concrete walls, a decomposing pigeon - alongside more lyrical compositions: a delicate swan; the sea's gleaming waves; a silver birch tree emerging from the darkness. The thread running through these images is Kiely's eye for chiaroscuro, which imbues the images with contrast and drama.

"It's all very instinctual," she says. "Something aligns - whether it's light, shade, pitch. If I walk down a street today and the sun is incredibly bright, there are certain images I'd take, and on a gloomy day, if I walk down the same street, I'd probably take completely different images, but they would still be, hopefully, as valid as each other." So far her eye has served her well: Kiely graduated from Manchester School of Art in 2015, and in quick succession was exhibited at Liverpool's Open Eye gallery, included in the British Journal of Photography's 2016 Portrait of Britain exhibition and nominated for MACK's First Book award.

Kiely was 14 when she got her first camera, a cheap digital device from Aldi, and although she never considered photography as a career - "I didn't know it could be, I didn't really know any photographers" - taking photos became a compulsion. While staying at her parents' this summer she found an old diary where she had written about wanting to exhibit her work at the village gallery. "I'd never even been to a photography show at that point," she says, "but I knew that was the dream, to have a show, which would have been atrocious probably. But it's something that's embedded in me. Photography is the first thing I think of when I wake up; it's the last thing I think of. It sounds terrible - it's doomed all my previous relationships. It's all-consuming."

For this feature, the acclaimed British documentary photographer Vanessa Winship - who won the 2011 Henri Cartier-Bresson award and had her first major UK show this summer at London's Barbican Art Gallery - singled out Kiely for the beauty and simplicity of her work. "It feels thoughtful, and we need thoughtful work," says Winship. "It doesn't feel like it's following a trend. It's work that asks questions, I believe, about who we are, who she is. It describes a state of being which feels very relevant in Britain today: a quiet disquiet." Another thing that attracted Winship to Kiely's work was that, when she saw a few of her photos in a studio, she recognised them straight away as prints developed in a darkroom.

The darkroom is an important part of the process for Kiely, although the first time she used film at university she felt terrified: "I remember being so scared of the pictures not coming out, of the film getting wrecked. There are so many possibilities of things going wrong with film and, to an extent, I'm still scared of that. But that's probably the magic of it." When she was living in Manchester she processed the prints herself; now the building has been knocked down, and on her travels she has to rely on others. Despite this, she's unlikely to go back to digital. "It's just not the same: there are so many digital images and I don't personally want to contribute to that."

Other aspects of Kiely's work, though, are still evolving. After her beloved Hasselblad camera broke she switched to a Yashica and is now exploring new European vistas with an expanded colour palette. "I don't want to be known for just one body of work," she says. "I was tired of Manchester - I needed a clear break. I purposefully wanted to go somewhere I'd never been, somewhere completely new and foreign to me. It's a complete change-up." Kathryn Bromwich

Hayahisa Tomiyasu, chosen by Takashi Homma

On a Sunday night in August 2011, photography student Hayahisa Tomiyasu saw a fox sniffing around a lawn in Leipzig, Germany. It relieved itself, turned around, and stared at him before walking off. In the next few days, Tomiyasu searched for it in vain, until one day he looked out of his dormitory window and saw the fox passing by a ping-pong table. He never saw the fox again; instead, he turned his attention to the ping-pong table.

Over the following five years, Tomiyasu kept his eye - and his camera - on the table, photographing passersby and social gatherings around it. People occasionally played table-tennis there, but that wasn't what he was looking for. He wanted to find the object's potential. "It shows how many possibilities the table has in itself, which you don't know before you see it," he says. "I'm interested in photographing an object you see every day, and how people behave around that object in a public space."

Slowly, the project took over his life. "It was very strange - most things seemed to happen if I had something to do. If I was going out and people came to the ping-pong table, often I had to cancel my appointment. I tried to be there always, every day, also at Christmas and New Year, to not miss what was happening." He amassed a prodigious number of images: perhaps 4,000.

The project turned into a book, TTP - or Tischtennisplatte, German for ping-pong table - released earlier this year and winner of the prestigious 2018 MACK First Book award. The renowned Japanese photographer Takashi Homma, whose highly influential book Tokyo Suburbia was published in 1998, nominated Tomiyasu for this feature. Homma says: "I'm interested in fixed-point photography because I'm also doing that. Hayahisa Tomiyasu does the best fixed-point observation I have ever seen - I'm jealous."

What Tomiyasu discovered with TTP was that people can be creative. In the book, two shirtless teenage boys box each other as a long-haired girl looks on, transfixed. A man does his washing in a bucket on the table, his shirts and blankets drying on a nearby railing. Various nappies are changed. Two girls have a night-time picnic. A child sits on the table, alone, a toy gun cradled to his face. In the dark, a man naked except for his socks and shoes squats on the table, a beer bottle perched precariously at his side.

Another motivation for the project was cultural observation. As a Japanese student living in Germany, Tomiyasu found it difficult to learn the country's social codes. "I was living in a student dorm where we didn't talk to each other often, not even a greeting. So, as a foreigner, it gave me a way to understand how people think and behave. For me, it was: 'Ah, OK, yeah.'"

Brought up in Chigasaki, Tomiyasu originally wanted to become a professional footballer: he trained intensely every day until, aged 18, he turned his attentions to his secondary interest, photography. He studied in Tokyo, then an exhibition made him fall in love with German contemporary photography. "What fascinated me was that it was another approach to reality. The eye for German photography is sometimes - in a positive way - cold, objective. Many photographs in Japan are taken in a private room, from a private point of view, and therefore very subjective."

He moved to Leipzig in 2008, partly to study in the class of Peter Piller, whose archive-based work influenced his own. Now 36, Tomiyasu lives in Zurich and is working on a street photography series looking at objects that people have thrown away.

On one of the last pages of TTP, a photograph seems to cast a new light on everything before it: a couple are seated on the table, and the man appears to be pointing towards the camera. Did people know the camera was there? Were they putting on a show? But they didn't know, says Tomiyasu: the image was placed there to stimulate debate about voyeurism, performance and artifice. The sequence of images in the book suggests a narrative of sorts, moving through the seasons, finding meaning in juxtaposition and contrast.

"I arranged the book according to association, to similarities," he says. "I did not order it chronologically but like a tale: I wanted to see if you could create a small history out of reality. It's not a normal photo book, but like a novel that you can read." Kathryn Bromwich

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The next generation: five leading photographers pick the hottest new talent

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"It's a publisher's idea of hell," laughs Tom Hunter, the renowned British artist-photographer best known for his staged tableaux referencing old master paintings. He's talking about Lacuna, an extraordinary new photography book by 25-year-old Londoner Katie Bret Day. "Usually, photographers try to make books as cheaply as possible, as many as possible, then get rid of them and make a profit.

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taylor wessing photographic portrait prize

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Winner of the 2018 Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize announced - in pictures

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A selection of images from the 2018 Taylor Wessing photographic Competition

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Infra Realism: deserts saturated with colour - in pictures

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Converting a digital camera for infrared, Australian photographer Kate Ballis wanted to show unique desert-scapes in a different way

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landscape photographer of the year award

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Landscape photographer of the year 2018 - in pictures

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Our selection of winning and shortlisted images from this year's competition reflects the diversity of the British landscape

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Uses modern techniques to create old looking images

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Playful postcards combining text and image

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From the series Powerful Mantras © Rick Pushinsky

The London-based photographer finds inspiration in everyday scenes for a project designed to be shared

It's said that inspiration can be found anywhere, and revelations from otherwise unremarkable moments. It's this subtlety that London-based photographer Rick Pushinsky has explored in his new work, Powerful Mantras, a set of 10 image-text postcards.

Pushinsky got into the habit of sharing images of the everyday via Instagram stories, which he uses to upload shots he's taken with his iPhone. "I take pictures of things I find interesting or amusing, and I share them," he says. "After some time, I started pairing those pictures with slices of text."

He's also a fan of motivational self-help books, written by the likes of life coach Tony Robbins - despite their somewhat cheesy reputation. "I find them fascinating," he explains. "Even though their references are slightly outdated and clichéd, their power in giving people an accessible framework to work through is incredible. Yes, they can seem silly, but they can also change your life."

Using these books Pushinksy picked out motivational quotes to pair with his pictures, spending hours trawling through the publications, highlighting sections and seeing what text worked alongside each image. "I made around 80 before I felt there was a project there. I then began editing them down and replicating the layouts on InDesign."

The result is a playful collection of witty yet strangely touching image-text pairings. 'Minds are like flowers' accompanies an image of gloves splayed out, as if blossoming, on the ground, and 'Destiny is real' floats over a cup of milky tea. "There's a hint of connection between each text and image," says Pushinsky. "I looked for images that appeared to have the mental space for a piece of text. Both text and image needed to have an open-endedness that would allow them to converse."

The postcard format is also deliberately anti-fetishistic. "It didn't seem appropriate to use a luxurious paper stock," he explains. "There's a deadpan, everyday quality to the photos you take on an iPhone on a grey day in London, and the resulting object needed to reflect that."

The cards are intended to be passed on, or stuck to the fridge with magnets. "It was the closest I could get to a physical version of Instagram," he muses. "It allowed me to make my images as shareable as possible, cheaply and quickly."

Previous projects have seen Pushinsky take a slower, more premeditated approach, so he found the fast pace of making Powerful Mantras liberating. "It felt important not to stop and analyse what I was doing too much, and there's a freshness that wouldn't have happened if I'd spent a long time on it," he say. "Something honest came out of it. It's my brain on paper."
www.pushinsky.com This article is taken from the August issue of BJP www.thebjpshop.com/product/aug-2018

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It's said that inspiration can be found anywhere, and revelations from otherwise unremarkable moments. It's this subtlety that London-based photographer Rick Pushinsky has explored in his new work, Powerful Mantras, a set of 10 image-text postcards. Pushinsky got into the habit of sharing images

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Long exposure photography

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Filmmaker Daniel Mercadante turns rural landscapes into magical terrains with his long exposure photography series, Rainbow Road. The collection of images sees a multicolored neon trail illuminate the landscape and seemingly take on a life of its own, as it snakes over quiet hills, weaves through forest trees, and twists around street corners.

Resembling a real-life Mario Kart race track, the series was made using a custom-built lighting rig covered in rainbow-colored gels. Mercadante ran across the landscape with the rig while his camera-set to a slow shutter speed-captured the scenes, blurring the movements onto one long rainbow road.

Though Mercadante mostly works on producing films with his wife Katina (together known as The Mercadantes), the artist reveals that exploring still image was a welcome challenge. He explains, "After so many years focused on the moving image, I've struggled with singularly caught moments in still imagery-so I love how this project still requires images to be captured over 15sec-1 minute, so in some way they require the same passages of time that a shot in one of our short films might."

So far, Mercadante's rainbow roads have appeared in the Connecticut countryside and Guatemala. The artist hopes to continue the series in locations across the world. You can stay updated with the series on Instagram.

Filmmaker Daniel Mercadante turns rural landscapes into magical terrains with his long exposure photography series, Rainbow Road.

The collection of images sees a multicolored neon trail illuminate the landscape and seemingly take on a life of its own, as it snakes over quiet hills, weaves through forest trees, and twists around street corners.

Resembling a real-life Mario Kart race track, the series was made using a custom-built lighting rig covered in rainbow-colored gels.
Long Exposure Photos Capture the Swirling Star Trails Across the Namib Desert Long Exposure Photos Capture Drones "Painting" Light Halos Over Mountains Long Exposure Photos Capture the Motions of Kayakers and Canoers Through Light and Color Long Exposures Capture WiFi Signals as Eerie Patterns of Color Magnificent Mirror Symmetry Long Exposures of Nighttime Japan Daniel Mercadante: Website | Facebook | Instagram | Vimeo
My Modern met granted permission to use photos by Daniel Mercadante.

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Vibrant Rainbow Roads Illuminate Forests and River Bends Into Magical Landscapes

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Filmmaker Daniel Mercadante turns rural landscapes into magical terrains with his long exposure photography series, "Rainbow Road." The collection of images sees a multicolored neon trail illuminate the landscape and seemingly take on a life of its own, as it snakes over quiet hills and weaves through forest trees.

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Photogram action at the Bar Chomsky, Riga 2013

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For one evening bar Chomsky was turned into darkroom and each visitor had possibility to create their own photogram. The exposure of light sensitive photo paper was made by photographing with flashlight. Exposed photo paper was developed at the bar and selection of images were exhibited....

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Landscape images showing effects of vision impairments eg cataracts

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Contemporary Floral Still Life

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Cameraless Photography

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From Hammer Museum , James Welling, 021R (2011), Chromogenic print, 46 × 37 in

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The line between female objectification and liberation on instagram

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The line between female objectification and liberation on instagram

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With 2014 voted the year of Instagram, now that it's 2015 we're starting to feel its cultural effects. Today's posts quickly become tomorrow's proverbial fish and chip paper and the need to consume is consuming us. Anyone with a smartphone can become an artist but this art is interspersed with so many holiday pictures and so much cock-teasing titillation that we can barely distinguish one from the other. It really comes down to something Andy Warhol said: "If you're not trying to be real, you don't have to get it right. That's art." And now everybody's faking it to make it. But when the ball's in your court there's nothing to stop you scoring and likewise Instagram provides a platform for art and self-expression which is totally unrivalled.

Knowing someone personally and then experiencing them through the filters of Instagram is both weird and refreshing. This was my experience when I first started following Millicent Hailes. My view of blunt, straight-talking tomboy-esque Millicent became aquainted with the fabulously dark and seductive girl you can see on your screen. Peppered with humour, her pictures are those of a girl who doesn't give a shit, but nevertheless would prefer to be liked. Best friend and collaborator, Nadia Lee Cohen, exhibits herself with similar tone and taste, using wigs and costumes to create an alternative reality where women rule and men rarely feature; there's also lots of tits; censored, or adorned, with hearts or emojis, giving the images a tongue-in-cheek appeal. Lee's professional work is theatrically staged with the trashy-luxe humour of American culture, whereas Hailes works with the playful, overexposed spontaneity of Juergen Teller or Terry Richardson. Despite their distinctive styles, their Instagram accounts look collaborated, merging into a third set.

The eroticism of these images has led to much discussion, not all of it positive. At a time when women are freeing the nipple (#freethenipple) and penises are making a debut on the catwalk it's surprising how nudity and overt sexuality can still hold offence for many people. Not that this has put Lee or Hailes off publicising their pictures; this is their way to connect to their audience and communicate the ideas and intention behind their work. As Hailes points out "I like to see who's behind the camera - I think it's really powerful," and their followers clearly do too. The conviction to 'live' their work is also a fundamental motivation behind their regular posts. "You've got to take a picture of yourself undressed too or who's going to trust you to take theirs? It's just not credible" explains Hailes. The notion of sisterhood is firm in their minds. If getting naked or acting provocatively is good enough for their models then it's good enough for them, it comes down to respecting the people they photograph and respecting the work that they make enough to be in it.

But why expose yourself on a public platform? Well, perhaps because in this narcissistic era where everybody is using social media for recognition, feedback and attention, this is the only real way to reach people. As the age old phrase goes, 'if you can't beat them, join them'. Hailes and Lee have not shied away from doing so; they're using Instagram their way and they've totally owned it. I asked both artists what differentiates their explicit photographs from those of a Page 3 girl, porn star or any girl who sees nudity as a way to get fame, money or validation. Unoffended by the comparison they explained that the intention behind the work, alongside their taste, education and the context within which they present it, is what makes the difference. Lee is familiar with being photographed in varying stages of undress and the experience of being photographed naked is something that comes recommended by her: "I'm not always completely confident, seeing myself in a strong photograph is a good feeling. I want the women I photograph to have that same experience. When there's an image of yourself that looks beautiful, you look at it and you think 'well that's me' even if you don't always feel great."

It's this element of fantasy and wish fulfilment that is the benchmark of Instagram. 'Who am I?' has been replaced by 'How do I appear?', but strangely how you appear slowly begins to tie back in to who you are. To quote Warhol again; "I know a girl who just looks at her face in the medicine cabinet mirror and never looks below her shoulders, and she's four or five hundred pounds but she doesn't see all that, she just sees a beautiful face and therefore she thinks she's a beauty. And therefore, I think she's a beauty, too, because I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do."

The philosophy of your behaviour shaping who you are is also beautifully outlined by Amy Cuddy in her 2012 TED talk. The theory goes that people who act confident, become confident. Self-worth comes from self-belief, and equally if you look good, you feel good. By presenting themselves in this way to the world, Lee and Hailes are exploring the erotic and bold sides of their nature. This curated view of themselves actually gives them confidence and sex appeal, which permeates their day-to-day lives.

Whether it is interpreted as soft porn or art, their photographs are taken by women, for women, and it is women who are responding to it en masse. If men like it too and are turned on that's cool, but for Hailes and Lee it's really about owning their bodies and their sexuality in a commanding way. "It's important to remain powerful with it - We'd never post a picture that we feel looks weak". There are plenty of people who might argue that these images merely contribute to the objectification of women, however, both girls believe that if it makes them, and the women they are photographing, feel empowered, then it's doing its job: "As long as our intentions are there to empower women and create strong imagery then that's what's important to us. You can't dictate how those images are received." By not taking it too seriously and just worrying about those directly involved, Lee and Hailes have produced a colourful, suggestive, playful and captivating body of work. Whether you're captivated because it turns you on or because they make good art is really no-one's business but your own.

Credits

Text Lily Bonesso

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​the line between female objectification and liberation on instagram

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With 2014 voted the year of Instagram, now that it's 2015 we're starting to feel its cultural effects. Today's posts quickly become tomorrow's proverbial fish and chip paper and the need to consume is consuming us.

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These 8 Photographers Captured the Youth Culture of the '90s | Artsy

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It's hard to imagine the 1990s without Corinne Day's portrait of a forlorn, 15-year-old Kate Moss striking a pose in skimpy silk underwear, following a fight with her then-boyfriend. Or Larry Clark's decade-defining film Kids (1995), which blew the lid off a drug-fueled, sex-obsessed band of New York City teenagers.

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The images look old, from the turn of the 20th century, but they have a sci-fi edge to them. Filled with mysterious, unfamiliar forms, the photos look as if they've captured strange, unnatural phenomena on old glass plates. This is the artwork of Peter Franck, who was awarded the first prize in this year's LensCulture Art Photography Awards.

Franck, who began his career as a painter, received a grant about five years ago to travel from Germany to the United States to research old photo archives. Fascinated by images from 1900 to 1910, he honed in on the archives' wet plate collodion photos. After viewing more than 25,000 images, he selected about 200 to work with, as a creative collaborator of sorts. The resulting images are mesmerizing.

LensCulture's editor -in-chief, Jim Casper, spoke with Franck to discuss his process and artistic drive. Here is an edited version of their conversation, along with a few before-and-after images.

LensCulture: So, can you tell me a little bit about how you work with photography? You mention in your artist's statement that for two years you've worked exclusively with archival work.

Peter Franck: I started as a painter years and years ago. I first came in contact with photography through my brother, who is an advertising photographer. Over time, I switched more and more into photography by starting to paint over photographs. I made big, big prints and painted over them. Then about five years ago, I met someone at an art residency in Germany who told us about the amazing archives in Rochester, New York. That was my step into this vintage world.

I got a grant to do some research in Rochester. I went into all these archives, like the Visual Studies Workshop, and then at the George Eastman House. And those led me to others. It went on and on and I got deeper into this world, into this lost world.

LC: What is it about this era, this early era in photography, that attracts you so much?

PF: Maybe you remember times when you were sitting with your grandparents in dark rooms and this screen pulls down, and you were watching holiday pictures? I think I was the only one in my family who was never tired of watching a thousand pictures in a row.

First, I like the atmosphere in the old photos. Then I think about the photographer standing there over 100 years ago, and I think about the time-distance from when the photographer was standing in Yosemite National Park (perhaps) making a photograph there, and then it went to an archive, then they digitalized it, and after all this time, I found something in this picture, which maybe was not the best picture photography-wise, but I've found something interesting for my world. So I try to extract the things out of this. My work is like a collaboration between anonymous photographers and me over a long time.

I'm a searcher, I'm a researcher. I bring things out of the dark. I understand myself not really as a photographer, I understand myself more as an artist that works with photography and painting and graphics.

I explored other archives. You know the Library of Congress has an immense collection. I have my favorite techniques and subjects, and I go searching. I search very quickly. Now I research only wet plate images - I think there are 20,000 - 25,000 there which are interesting for me. I scroll down through all these pictures very quickly.

And sometimes, something fits, but I don't really know what or why. I see something very quickly in the picture, which has a connection to my interests. It's similar to sometimes when we go out and take photos with a camera. We take a photo, maybe not thinking about every detail, and that's the same thing I do with the archives. It's like going out, but instead I just go in the archives.

It's difficult to explain, but my interests come from my perspective as a painter. Sometimes there's just a sense of light in a picture, or a cloud, or something like that - indicators for me to pull them out of the archive, and then I start with the work.

LC: I love that process of just going to explore in the archives, as if you were taking a trip, and just waiting until something intriguing presents itself to you.

PF: I think it's more fun to go outside doing photos, actually. But because of these great archives, the whole day I sit in front of this computer looking at thousands of old images. Sometimes, I'm wondering what I'm doing here, because the real world is outside.

LC: Yes, of course. So, tell me a little bit about your process once you find a picture that you want to start your collaboration with.

PF: I'm not interested in who made the pictures. I look at the dates. Most of my pictures were made around 1900 to 1910. And the themes, the topics are mostly landscapes, seascapes. It began with finding some very interesting photos about ships, wrecked, and my interest opened up to all kinds of seascapes and landscapes. Then I try to extract that special essence that I noticed, like some miracle inside the picture, some story. Sometimes, the pictures are too perfect for me, because the photographer, a hundred years before, did such good work that it's difficult to change something. So, I set those aside.

The pictures I prefer are on the edge of becoming an artwork, and I try to bring it to an end.

LC: Creativity is a mysterious process, right?

PF: Sure. Sometimes it just needed a stripe or a cloud or something like that, which attracted me into the picture. Then I work for maybe one day on the picture, maybe one, two days.

LC: So, tell me a little bit about the process that you go through then.

PF: Yes, it's just doing Photoshop. That's all.

LC: But are you incorporating some photographs that you've made into the other one, or are you drawing from other archival photos, or...

PF: Sometime I mix them. I have a big archive with trees, clouds, everything. And if I sense something is missing from the composition, I put them together. Maybe I need more clouds, so I go into my archive of clouds...

But before this wet plate stuff started, I did the same thing with other kinds of images. I have faces, I have legs, I have wallpapers, a lot of wallpapers. And like the colors I have in the studio, I use them where they will work.

I think the best things are when you see something and you do it directly, and it's finished in about two hours. If you work too hard or too long on a picture, it goes over the top sometimes. And it's too perfect. And that's the charm of these old photos. They are perfect in a way, but imperfect in another way.

LC: What's next for you?

PF: My plan is to make some big prints from the photos you know now from this contest. It's a big series, it's maybe 200 pictures from this series.

LC: Oh, wow.

PF: Yeah, my series are really big. It's maybe a German kind of thinking that if you do something, you have to do a lot of it. Not just testing. If it works, you have to do it as long as you think there's something new to explore. Then there comes a time when you think, yeah, you can do another thousands of them, yet what will that accomplish? But most of the time it's not a sharp change like a cut; it flows from one theme or one series into another.

LC: In your statement, you said, "At the beginning of photography's history, there existed the moment, the light, and the motive." Can you expand a little more on that? Tell me how you think things have changed and evolved since that early history.

PF: Things have changed so much. I think nowadays, it's the problem that there's this enormous mass of pictures, and not many people care about the light or composition too much, because they have in mind, we can fix it after. I know this from this advertising stuff, because sometimes I go with my brother, and it doesn't matter if it's too dark. It doesn't matter if there are too many people in it.

LC: We can correct it all after the fact, right.

PF: But in former days, a guy would stand on top of a hill waiting two hours to make a one-second exposure, and that was what you got. I am trying to come to this point, but with another technology. I'm using digital technology with archival images, but my next step is to make my own wet plate images and work with them. That's why I am starting to use a big old wet plate collodion camera, and when I perfect that process, I will be completely analog again.

LC: I'm really eager to see what you do next. And you're thinking, in terms of subject matter, you'll continue with landscapes, or ...

PF: No, not necessarily. Landscapes do have many possibilities to express different ideas. For now, I'm into this landscape thing, but who knows. Because sometimes it's a technique that brings you to another theme. Maybe I will find some cityscapes here with this old camera, and then I will switch. But I switch slowly.

I'm a searcher, I'm a researcher, I bring things out of the dark. I understand myself not really as a photographer, I understand myself more as an artist that works with photography and painting and graphics.

With this old camera, I've made 50 or 70 wet plates now, and it's not that difficult, technically. The difficulties are to bring the camera in the woods with everything you need ... I 'm trying to develop a car, you know these small Italian cars with the three wheels? They're called Apes. You have three wheels, one in front, two in the back. Well I was thinking about doing a mobile darkroom inside, and then go out to people in the city or go out in the woods. But we will see.

- Peter Franck interviewed by Jim Casper

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Landscapes - Interview by Jim Casper | LensCulture

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The images look old, from the turn of the 20th century, but they have a sci-fi edge to them. Filled with mysterious, unfamiliar forms, the photos look as if they've captured strange, unnatural phenomena on old glass plates. This is the artwork of Peter Franck, who was awarded the first prize in this year's LensCulture Art Photography Awards.

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Starting with wet plate collodion photos from the early 1900s, artist Peter Franck creates quirky images that twist and bend reality just enough to make you look twice.

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The images look old, from the turn of the 20th century, but they have a sci-fi edge to them. Filled with mysterious, unfamiliar forms, the photos look as if they've captured strange, unnatural phenomena on old glass plates. This is the artwork of Peter Franck, who was awarded the first prize in this year's LensCulture Art Photography Awards.

Franck, who began his career as a painter, received a grant about five years ago to travel from Germany to the United States to research old photo archives. Fascinated by images from 1900 to 1910, he honed in on the archives' wet plate collodion photos. After viewing more than 25,000 images, he selected about 200 to work with, as a creative collaborator of sorts. The resulting images are mesmerizing.

LensCulture's editor -in-chief, Jim Casper, spoke with Franck to discuss his process and artistic drive. Here is an edited version of their conversation, along with a few before-and-after images.

LensCulture: So, can you tell me a little bit about how you work with photography? You mention in your artist's statement that for two years you've worked exclusively with archival work.

Peter Franck: I started as a painter years and years ago. I first came in contact with photography through my brother, who is an advertising photographer. Over time, I switched more and more into photography by starting to paint over photographs. I made big, big prints and painted over them. Then about five years ago, I met someone at an art residency in Germany who told us about the amazing archives in Rochester, New York. That was my step into this vintage world.

I got a grant to do some research in Rochester. I went into all these archives, like the Visual Studies Workshop, and then at the George Eastman House. And those led me to others. It went on and on and I got deeper into this world, into this lost world.

LC: What is it about this era, this early era in photography, that attracts you so much?

PF: Maybe you remember times when you were sitting with your grandparents in dark rooms and this screen pulls down, and you were watching holiday pictures? I think I was the only one in my family who was never tired of watching a thousand pictures in a row.

First, I like the atmosphere in the old photos. Then I think about the photographer standing there over 100 years ago, and I think about the time-distance from when the photographer was standing in Yosemite National Park (perhaps) making a photograph there, and then it went to an archive, then they digitalized it, and after all this time, I found something in this picture, which maybe was not the best picture photography-wise, but I've found something interesting for my world. So I try to extract the things out of this. My work is like a collaboration between anonymous photographers and me over a long time.

I'm a searcher, I'm a researcher. I bring things out of the dark. I understand myself not really as a photographer, I understand myself more as an artist that works with photography and painting and graphics.

I explored other archives. You know the Library of Congress has an immense collection. I have my favorite techniques and subjects, and I go searching. I search very quickly. Now I research only wet plate images - I think there are 20,000 - 25,000 there which are interesting for me. I scroll down through all these pictures very quickly.

And sometimes, something fits, but I don't really know what or why. I see something very quickly in the picture, which has a connection to my interests. It's similar to sometimes when we go out and take photos with a camera. We take a photo, maybe not thinking about every detail, and that's the same thing I do with the archives. It's like going out, but instead I just go in the archives.

It's difficult to explain, but my interests come from my perspective as a painter. Sometimes there's just a sense of light in a picture, or a cloud, or something like that - indicators for me to pull them out of the archive, and then I start with the work.

LC: I love that process of just going to explore in the archives, as if you were taking a trip, and just waiting until something intriguing presents itself to you.

PF: I think it's more fun to go outside doing photos, actually. But because of these great archives, the whole day I sit in front of this computer looking at thousands of old images. Sometimes, I'm wondering what I'm doing here, because the real world is outside.

LC: Yes, of course. So, tell me a little bit about your process once you find a picture that you want to start your collaboration with.

PF: I'm not interested in who made the pictures. I look at the dates. Most of my pictures were made around 1900 to 1910. And the themes, the topics are mostly landscapes, seascapes. It began with finding some very interesting photos about ships, wrecked, and my interest opened up to all kinds of seascapes and landscapes. Then I try to extract that special essence that I noticed, like some miracle inside the picture, some story. Sometimes, the pictures are too perfect for me, because the photographer, a hundred years before, did such good work that it's difficult to change something. So, I set those aside.

The pictures I prefer are on the edge of becoming an artwork, and I try to bring it to an end.

LC: Creativity is a mysterious process, right?

PF: Sure. Sometimes it just needed a stripe or a cloud or something like that, which attracted me into the picture. Then I work for maybe one day on the picture, maybe one, two days.

LC: So, tell me a little bit about the process that you go through then.

PF: Yes, it's just doing Photoshop. That's all.

LC: But are you incorporating some photographs that you've made into the other one, or are you drawing from other archival photos, or...

PF: Sometime I mix them. I have a big archive with trees, clouds, everything. And if I sense something is missing from the composition, I put them together. Maybe I need more clouds, so I go into my archive of clouds...

But before this wet plate stuff started, I did the same thing with other kinds of images. I have faces, I have legs, I have wallpapers, a lot of wallpapers. And like the colors I have in the studio, I use them where they will work.

I think the best things are when you see something and you do it directly, and it's finished in about two hours. If you work too hard or too long on a picture, it goes over the top sometimes. And it's too perfect. And that's the charm of these old photos. They are perfect in a way, but imperfect in another way.

LC: What's next for you?

PF: My plan is to make some big prints from the photos you know now from this contest. It's a big series, it's maybe 200 pictures from this series.

LC: Oh, wow.

PF: Yeah, my series are really big. It's maybe a German kind of thinking that if you do something, you have to do a lot of it. Not just testing. If it works, you have to do it as long as you think there's something new to explore. Then there comes a time when you think, yeah, you can do another thousands of them, yet what will that accomplish? But most of the time it's not a sharp change like a cut; it flows from one theme or one series into another.

LC: In your statement, you said, "At the beginning of photography's history, there existed the moment, the light, and the motive." Can you expand a little more on that? Tell me how you think things have changed and evolved since that early history.

PF: Things have changed so much. I think nowadays, it's the problem that there's this enormous mass of pictures, and not many people care about the light or composition too much, because they have in mind, we can fix it after. I know this from this advertising stuff, because sometimes I go with my brother, and it doesn't matter if it's too dark. It doesn't matter if there are too many people in it.

LC: We can correct it all after the fact, right.

PF: But in former days, a guy would stand on top of a hill waiting two hours to make a one-second exposure, and that was what you got. I am trying to come to this point, but with another technology. I'm using digital technology with archival images, but my next step is to make my own wet plate images and work with them. That's why I am starting to use a big old wet plate collodion camera, and when I perfect that process, I will be completely analog again.

LC: I'm really eager to see what you do next. And you're thinking, in terms of subject matter, you'll continue with landscapes, or ...

PF: No, not necessarily. Landscapes do have many possibilities to express different ideas. For now, I'm into this landscape thing, but who knows. Because sometimes it's a technique that brings you to another theme. Maybe I will find some cityscapes here with this old camera, and then I will switch. But I switch slowly.

I'm a searcher, I'm a researcher, I bring things out of the dark. I understand myself not really as a photographer, I understand myself more as an artist that works with photography and painting and graphics.

With this old camera, I've made 50 or 70 wet plates now, and it's not that difficult, technically. The difficulties are to bring the camera in the woods with everything you need ... I 'm trying to develop a car, you know these small Italian cars with the three wheels? They're called Apes. You have three wheels, one in front, two in the back. Well I was thinking about doing a mobile darkroom inside, and then go out to people in the city or go out in the woods. But we will see.

- Peter Franck interviewed by Jim Casper

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Landscapes - Interview by Jim Casper | LensCulture

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The images look old, from the turn of the 20th century, but they have a sci-fi edge to them. Filled with mysterious, unfamiliar forms, the photos look as if they've captured strange, unnatural phenomena on old glass plates. This is the artwork of Peter Franck, who was awarded the first prize in this year's LensCulture Art Photography Awards.

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For the past 20 years, street photography has meant everything to me: from the moment I wake up, to the moment my head hits the pillow. It has been an overwhelming obsession and a way of life. I just love being out in the world, observing people, trying to make some sense of it all.

-Matt Stuart

Individuals who are known for their artistic talents often specialize in one field, genre or even subject, but it is rare that the full range of their passions are so narrowly confined. Take Matt Stuart: two decades a street photographer; a longtime member of iN-PUBLiC-one of the most renowned street photography collectives in the world; and now a nominee member of Magnum Photos-one of the most respected photography collectives in the world.

But before he was driven every day by his desire to hit the streets with his camera, he was pounding the pavement with a skateboard, eventually achieving nationwide success in the sport. For anyone who has tried, becoming a great (or even passable) skateboarder requires an endless amount of patience and determination, since the rate of failure for even the simplest tricks is quite high. Yet for anyone who has practiced street photography, this ratio will sound quite familiar. Stuart, though, embraced both challenges without hesitation.

At the age of 22, thanks to a fortuitous pair of gifts from his father-a Photo Poche book about Henri Cartier-Bresson and an Aperture monograph on Robert Frank-Stuart was "given the bug." Soon, his board was replaced with a Leica and not long thereafter, a weekend workshop with Leonard Freed served as the clincher. In Stuart's words, "to see Freed work and explain his photography was a revelation-I will never forget it."

Two decades later and his passion has not let up. When asked what keeps his fires burning, Stuart replied simply, "I never need a rest," and then went on to say, "Which is a little worrying sometimes...I'm sure I'll slow down some time, but it hasn't happened , much to my family and friends' frustration."

Despite the constant drive, Stuart manages to bring pleasure and a sense of fun to his photography. As he tells us:

"Be patient, optimistic; remember to smile, both for others, and for yourself. Don't get depressed when you miss the shot; there's just another around the corner if you keep your eyes open."

Perhaps this upbeat attitudes comes to Stuart thanks to another one of his passions: comedy. Although he rarely has time to indulge in the pastime, almost every one of his frames pays some sort of tribute to this deep influence. Throughout his photographs, one encounters a reality filled with touches of humor, irony and dry, British mischief.

On the other hand, his streak of wit is counter-balanced by a deep reverence for the power of the genre; Stuart believes deeply in its ability to show us the world. Although street photography is sometimes dismissed as merely accidental or lucky, Stuart believes, "street photographers who are serious about what they do are existentialists. They like to think about living and existing more than most."

In the same vein, good, old-fashioned reality is a hallmark of all his pictures. In Stuart's words:

"It's nice to know that things actually happened isn't it? Too much is cheated and manipulated these days. I like to know that the meat I eat is organically certified; same with my photography-no short cuts."

Today, Stuart finds himself prowling the streets daily, in search of new frames and moments out in the world. Although much of his work is shot in and around his birthplace of London, there is nothing particular to the city, or anywhere else, that draws him. Wherever Stuarts finds himself, he is endlessly fascinated by how, "people inhabit space" and about, "what might be going on right now, what I might be missing." The attraction, in short, to the medium that has obsessed Stuart across two decades can be put as simply as this: "street photography seems to offer me endless opportunities-every day is different and I love that."

Skateboarding, comedy, street photography-the highs are high yet rare; the lows frequent and demoralizing. Thus, aficionados of any of these fields would do well to take Stuart's words to heart:

"You are looking for a single, brilliant moment and 99% of the time, you won't get it. But remember this: when at last you get that shot you've been looking for, in a thousandth of a second, all those frustrations and near-misses will have paid off. So get out there and keep shooting!"

-Alexander Strecker

For more on Matt Stuart's philosophy on street photography, don't miss this short, yet excellent, video interview with Stuart from 2010:

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In Search of Brilliant Moments: Street Photography's Heightened Existence - Interview with Matt Stuart | By Alexander Strecker | LensCulture

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For the past 20 years, street photography has meant everything to me: from the moment I wake up, to the moment my head hits the pillow. It has been an overwhelming obsession and a way of life. I just love being out in the world, observing people, trying to make some sense of it all.

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The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also omit to paint that which he sees before him.

- Caspar David Friedrich

Today, what we do when we are confronted with overwhelming beauty? Again and again, our first inclination is to raise a camera (or phone) to "capture" the moment, hopefully for ever.

But if we spend all of our time taking pictures-what will finally be remembered? Feelings from the moment; an amazing view; or just a technically recorded image? And if we choose to photograph the scene-how long will we remember the original experience? Does the act of photographing even cause us to forget?

The project "Live View" raises questions about how photography, as a medium, is being used to expand (replace? diminish?) our memory. The title refers to the function in digital cameras and phones which instantly displays reality on their screens. In this moment, we are confronted with a paradox-a "live" view as seen through a digital intermediary.

Visually, photographs-especially of the landscape-have always juxtaposed the romantic idea of the sublime with a more quotidian, touristic " must see before you die " urge. But with the ubiquity of cameras nowadays, this contrast is only growing more striking. For example, show up at Angkor Wat at 5 AM on an unsuspecting morning and you'll find over 300 photographers who were likewise advised by their guidebook to take "the sunrise picture of a lifetime." The same at Macchu Picchu, the Grand Canyon, Santorini-anywhere that has found its way onto a top 10 (or top 1000) list...

"Live View" was photographed at sites around the world: Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Cambodia, France, India, Switzerland.

Editor's Note: Live View was exhibited at the 2015 FORMAT International Photography Festival in Derby under the theme "EVIDENCE." This year's theme is HABITAT and is currently accepting proposals for projects and exhibitions. Learn more about this great opportunity to exhibit your work at a world-class festival-the deadline to submit is fast approaching!

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Live View: Our Point and Shoot Memories - Photographs by Artur Urbanski | LensCulture

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The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also omit to paint that which he sees before him. - Caspar David Friedrich Today, what we do when we are confronted with overwhelming beauty?

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Martin Venezky and Barbara Levine Horizon

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Martin Venezky and Barbara Levine Horizon

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"We have been where you are going."

I recited this phrase when I set to work on the "Horizon" photographs. It captures the blurriness between past and present and reminds me that whatever I wish for has been sought out by others before me.

The works in the "Horizon" series represent a collaboration with my dear friend and fellow artist Barbara Levine. Although we both collect vernacular photography, the way we respond to our pictures is different, and the dialogue between us grounds our work.

I am partial to the unremarkable. The lack of aesthetics reminds me how quickly the images we cherish can empty themselves of value. Barbara, on the other hand, recognizes the sublime hiding in plain sight. She sees how pictures of apparent limited value often overflow with tension and beauty. For the photographs we make together, we construct a fresh encounter with the past-and with photography itself-by reorganizing the horizon line and thereby confounding time.

I slice apart anonymous photos, placing them side by side, combining and recombining to create unexpected juxtapositions. When I discover connections and form relationships, the overwhelming anonymity of any one snapshot gives way to mystery. An inadvertent detail can demand our full attention. As the composition builds, I add sections of my own recent color photographs, connecting realism and abstraction to create a challenging immediacy.

For me, the photographic relationship between the pictorial and the abstract is one of the most fundamental understandings of place and time. "Place" is something we carry with us-a summation of our inner memories mapped onto the present landscape as we traverse it. The continuity of the land, though, has its own unbroken timeframe, and it is much longer and steadier than the interrupted, distracted time we are able to spend with it. While we look for the universal, we are always tripped up by our own presence.

We don't know the people who populate our photographs, but we can embody their boredom, their anxiety, and the desert sun on the backs of their necks. They chose to capture their moments for unknowable reasons. Barbara and I have chosen to yoke them together to conjure future places and infinite possibilities. They have been where we are going.

-Martin Venezky

Editor's Note: Venezky and Levine's project was recognized by the jury of the LensCulture Exposure Awards 2017-don't miss the work from all 44 of the outstanding, international talents!

If you enjoyed this article, you might like these previous features: All Lines and Diagonals, engaging photo-based collages based on several decades' worth of artistic scraps; River and Sky, distorted images of Flint, Michigan as well as shots of "deep space" made with tainted materials; and Threads, landscapes modified with embroidered thread that meditate on our relationship with nature.

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Horizon - By Martin Venezky and Barbara Levine | LensCulture

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"We have been where you are going." I recited this phrase when I set to work on the "Horizon" photographs. It captures the blurriness between past and present and reminds me that whatever I wish for has been sought out by others before me.

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When it comes to depicting motherhood, stereotypes abound. From the age-old Madonna and Child to today's celebrity moms beaming from magazine covers, motherhood endures as and subject of both fascination and controversy. For decades, artists have worked to change the ways in which childbearing and child-rearing have been perceived. The following photographs illuminate truths about the experience and potential of motherhood.

Drawn to the road and its possibilities, Justine Kurland spent the better part of twelve years traveling the United States in a van. Her son, Casper, played a key role in the resulting book, Highway Kind, often accompanying her, and determining the direction of her photographs. Traversing her role as both artist and mother, Kurland's work reflects a delicate balance between the need for routine and the desire for freedom and escape.

LaToya Ruby Frazier collaborated with her mother and grandmother to create an intergenerational exploration of the legacy of racism and economic decline in America's small towns, as embodied by her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. The Notion of Family is a statement both personal and truly political-an intervention in the histories and narratives of the region.

Doug DuBois photographed his family for over twenty years to produce ...all the days and nights. His intimate portraits resonate with emotional immediacy, offering a potent examination of family relations, and what it means to subject personal relationships to the unblinking eye of the camera.

"Tiny" (Erin Charles) is unforgettable. Mary Ellen Mark first met the fiercely independent thirteen-year-old living on the streets of Seattle, and continued photographing her for over 30 years. Now in her forties, Tiny has ten children, and Mary Ellen Mark's Tiny: Streetwise Revisited remains a unique perspective on class, motherhood, addiction, and ultimately, love.

For her project, , Carucci documented nine years of raising her twins, from the expectance of pregnancy, to the chaos of their youth. The resulting work peels back the sentimental façade of motherhood, revealing the rawness, banality, and beauty of her reality.

Learn more about here.

When Immediate Family was first published in 1992, Sally Mann's intimate photos of her children-roaming naked and free on their family farm in Virginia-were a dramatic and controversial departure from stereotypical portrayals of motherhood that dominated visual culture at the time.

Dorothea Lange, who documented rural poverty for the federal Farm Security Administration throughout the Great Depression, is perhaps best known for this image. "Migrant Mother," portraying a thirty-two-year-old mother in a pea-picker's camp struggling to feed her seven children, would become an icon of the era.

Alice Proujansky's project, Women's Work, follows women as they navigate childbirth, motherhood, and career, offering insight into the challenges that many mothers face in maintaining their personal and professional identities along the way.

Proujansky is also the author of Go Photo! An Activity Book for Kids.

Robin Schwartz began collaborating with her daughter, Amelia, when Amelia was just three years old. Now eighteen, Amelia has become her mother's muse. Amelia and the Animals depicts their journey into invented worlds and fables, and has brought the two closer. "Photography gives us the opportunity to access our dreams," Schwartz said, "to discover the extraordinary."

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When it comes to depicting motherhood, stereotypes abound. From the age-old Madonna and Child to today's celebrity moms beaming from magazine covers, motherhood endures as and subject of both fascination and controversy. For decades, artists have worked to change the ways in which childbearing and child-rearing have been perceived.

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© Jo Metson Scott

Fresh, fast, adaptable and affordable. More and more photographers, including photojournalist Jo Metson Scott and social documentarian Martin Parr, are turning to newsprint.

During summer 2015, you couldn't open a paper without seeing photographs of the Syrian refugee crisis - the worst such crisis since the Second World War.

The photographs are heart-wrenching, showing rickety rafts piled high with men, women and children, desperate to make their way across the sea to Europe; or these travellers arriving on Greek beaches, drenched, tearful, and exhausted. Depending on the publication, the articles accompanying the pictures ranged from empathetic to sensational.

Prompted by these news reports, photography agency Webber Represents planned a fundraiser for Refugee Support Europe, a charity working with refugees. When Jo Metson Scott - one of the image-makers they represent - heard about it, she seized on the chance of looking beyond the headlines. In October 2016 she spent a week photographing and interviewing people living in a camp run by the charity in Greece - the results of which she published as a newsprint zine through Newspaper Club in December.

"At the time there were 800 people, half of whom were children, living in tents, which I found quite shocking" says Metson Scott. "They'd made it across the water and a lot of them had made it as far as Macedonia but then the borders closed. I wanted to look at the people who were trapped, waiting to be processed, in Greece."

Still suffering immense trauma from experiences they'd undergone in Syria and on the journey out, some had been waiting for four months already."Life was on hold," said Metson Scott, whose pictures and words capture quietly and beautifully that sense of limbo.

"They can't be self-sufficient, even though they want to be. They weren't allowed to make fires so they weren't able to cook their own food. They were waiting for food. They were waiting for donations of clothes, waiting to get their phones charged."

Metson Scott was led by each person whose story she was documenting, but she was also keen to address certain issues that came up in press about refugees - such as why so many young men travel alone. "Often because the family can't afford to send everyone, they have to make the heartbreaking decision who to send - and it's usually a male because they're about to be conscripted to a military they don't want to be part of."

Metson Scott has always questioned received media narratives. Her book The Grey Line , a study of British and American soldiers who have spoken out about the Iraq war and the repercussions they faced, was published in 2013 by Dewi Lewis to great acclaim. Since then she has continued to produce personal work such as Borderland , on the Scottish referendum; , following a young Olympic hopeful; and , about the physicality of new parenthood, while shooting fashion and editorial commissions, and working as photo director at Pleasure Garden Magazine.

As such, Metson Scott is used to finding outlets outside the mainstream and, after first showing her work on refugees on Instagram in a collaboration with The New Yorker, decided to publish it as a newsprint zine .

"It was nice to be able to publish some of the words with the story but it was really an awareness and a visual tool to tie in with the auction," she says. "I like the fact that it's fast, you can be less precious in a way. I'd definitely do it again."

Life on a Syrian Refugee Camp is one example of the many ways photographers have published their work with Newspaper Club . Martin Parr's The Rhubarb Triangle was made to accompany an exhibition of work by the same name which was commissioned by Hepworth Wakefield. In true Parr style, the paper is a wry, affectionate insight into a quirky section of British life.

Others have created newspapers as a promotional tool to send to current and prospective clients, a large-format alternative to the traditional postcard. Naomi Harris portfolio brings the curiosity and humour of her images into the layout, with headlines playing off the various characters she captures. Roger Kisby used the space to showcase a single shoot with the actress Hari Nef, while Winne Au's Way Over Where is a playful journey through the homes and workspaces of creatives she photographed in the course of a year.

"The bulk of what we do is work for creative people - photographers, illustrators, creative agencies, they're our biggest customers," says Newspaper Club 's CEO Anne Ward. The company was founded in 2010 - one of a wave of printers pushing against the idea that print's days were numbered. The company offers an online design tool to help customers create layouts, a selection of formats, produced using both digital and traditional printing techniques, and print runs ranging from one-off newspapers to 100,000 copies or more.

For photographers the appeal of newsprint is that it offers "something eye-catching and different that's also cost effective," says Ward, who is continually surprised by inventive approaches they take. "It's something they're very familiar with but they've not always had a chance to print on it."

And as for Newspaper Club , their mission is clear: "We're trying to keep newspapers - and print - alive."
Working on a new project that you want the world to see? Then maybe you should think about publishing it as a newspaper. Visit Newspaper Club's website to find out how. Partner Content - Newspaper Club: This feature was made possible with the support of Newspaper Club. Please click here for more information on sponsored content funding at British Journal of Photography.

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© Jo Metson Scott Fresh, fast, adaptable and affordable. More and more photographers, including photojournalist Jo Metson Scott and social documentarian Martin Parr, are turning to newsprint. During summer 2015, you couldn't open a paper without seeing photographs of the Syrian refugee crisis - the worst such crisis since the Second World War.

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How the pitch black of the hours after sundown inspired Patrick Zachmann to start photographing in color after years of working in black and white
Patrick Zachmann
Whilst daylight gives birth to the rainbow of colors under the sun, when night falls, the black backdrop conjures up new contrasts of color. The orange glow emanating from an open doorway on a dark street, suggesting late-night life inside, the flickering of an insomniac's television observed through a window in the small hours, the buzzing neon signs of the nocturnal economy, all conspired to ignite the imagination of Magnum photographer Patrick Zachmann. Here, Zachmann writes about why he is drawn to photographing the night, and how China's nocturnal underbelly inspired him to begin working in color.

"I've always been drawn to night-time atmospheres. Like many other photographers I guess, I like the world of Brassai and Weegee. In the past I've photographed, in black and white, many parts of the underworld at night. Today, it is with color that I explore it, staying awake throughout the night in metropolises, even though I am not a sleepwalker, insomniac or even really a nocturnal person. Simply put, I like photographing nocturnal atmospheres and lighting. I just love the artificial colors, a light upon a face, or even a shadow projected upon a wall that then becomes a screen.

"The lights change, hot or cold, colliding prettily into a mix of color temperatures"

- Patrick Zachmann

My images move away from reportage and become impressionist. Ugly and grey during the day a city becomes attractive at night, or sometimes frightening. The lights change, hot or cold, colliding prettily into a mix of color temperatures. They make faces smooth, mix up ages, blur signs of belonging and allow silhouettes lit by a streetlamp or a car headlight to be discovered.

"I just love the artificial colors, a light upon a face, or even a shadow projected upon a wall that then becomes a screen."

- Patrick Zachmann

These images don't show a particular night life but rather certain ambiences close to cinema. Walks and night-time wanderings from Paris to Seoul, from London to Rio de Janeiro, without forgetting Amsterdam, Barcelona or even Bamako. The photographer finds himself divided between the desire to enter into the intimacy of others and the necessary distance that photography expects him to keep.

"Ugly and grey during the day a city becomes attractive at night
"

"These images don't show a particular night life but rather certain ambiences close to cinema"

- Patrick Zachmann

- Patrick Zachmann

In the role of an observer he positions himself on the edge of the world that he is studying. Solitarily scrutinizing the city in obscurity, he hesitates between entering into this nocturnal universe or staying outside it. My photographs are the story of this double attraction."

Between 1982 and the 1990s, when I was photographing China, there really wasn't any nightlife. Or, to be more precise, nightlife did exist, but it was secretive, hidden, underground. Today, everything is out in the open: everywhere, Chinese cities are alive at night. People go to the city to work all day, then distract themselves at night until they are exhausted.

Willingly or not, young women from the poorer provinces frequently become hostesses, masseuses or prostitutes. They inhabit and animate the world of the night, which is perceived as a "vice" of Western society and attracts armies of businessmen, nouveaux riche and young people. Vibrant and glowing, Chinese nightlife inspired me to stay up late, though I am not particularly nocturnal, and to begin working in color. I wanted to capture the play of light on people and the city impressionistically-a vision of China that shifted from the "Mao suit," a sad blue-gray uniform, to a world of bold, extravagant color.

Far from reportage, this series is also influenced by ideas of territory and identity: a nocturnal identity that situates itself in transience, in the fleeting quality of the moment."

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Photographing the Night * Patrick Zachmann * Magnum Photos

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How the pitch black of the hours after sundown inspired Patrick Zachmann to start photographing in color after years of working in black and white Patrick Zachmann Whilst daylight gives birth to the rainbow of colors under the sun, when night falls, the black backdrop conjures up new contrasts of color.

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Multi layered/ coloured/ painted on landscapes

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Paralax © Chloe Sells

Faced with the difficult reality of her husband's illness, the photographer found solace in the harsh but beautiful landscape of Botswana's Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, and has now published a book of the work

"Seventeen years later and after all that life giveth and taketh away, it is the wildness of the region that attracts me most," writes artist Chloe Sells of Botswana, the place where she shot her latest book Flamingo. "Botswana is one of the last great completely wild, untouched and quiet corners of the earth."

In particular she was attracted to Botswana's Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, in the heart of the Kalahari Desert, a strange and harsh, yet beautiful landscape. "I didn't know that part of Botswana very well," Sells admits, "but I had visited many times and been amazed by the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans; I knew I wanted to spend more time there."

"The atmosphere in that part of the desert is quiet and lonely," she writes. "It is inhospitable for most humans and many animals. It is a reflective place, and I feel very free when I am there."

For Sells, the open space offered the chance to reflect on something very difficult - the fact that her husband was dying. Returning again and again to shoot in the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans and Sua Pan, she saw how the landscape changed with the seasons, and life at its most elemental. "In this environment survival is only for the fittest," she says. "The birds come and they go."

The salt pans are famous for their flamingos, but while Sells saw them for herself, they don't feature in the images. "I just had bad luck," she says. "Not only that, but flamingos got the memo; they hate humans. If you walk one step towards them, they walk one step away. Plus, they fly and the area is vast; most of it cannot be accessed by vehicle, only through huge tracts of sticky, thick mud. Unless I was going to become a National Geographic photographer, build a hide and live out there for a couple of weeks at a time, flamingos were not to be mine."

"...The conditions on the Pans are harsh. The wind howls, the rain drives, the sun beats down ferociously and you are Lilliputian in the cosmic order of the Makgadikgadi. I made the pictures at sunset and sunrise. I tried to catch the full moon, which would mean the sun would set at the same time the moon would rise and then the following morning on the opposite side of the sky, the moon would set as the sun would rise. This was not only wonderful to photograph, it is also a perfect, monthly celestial event."

After photographing with an analogue large format camera in Botswana, Sells brought her film back to London and spent months working on her images in the darkroom. Standing full days on her feet, she worked tirelessly to conjure something from thin air - a physically challenging process. "I often think about images for days or weeks before beginning on them. It is a long process of experimentation. Sometimes the results are fruitful and others fruitless. Loss is part of the process."

Tactility is very important to Sells. "I use ink, markers and paint on the surface with the same thought process in mind," she says. "I am somehow trying to complete the image through making marks on them. Of course the processes that I use bring the images away from the "truth" of what the place looks like, but they are then inscribed with what I believe the place feels like too."

The work itself was presented in three exhibitions - one at the Michael Hoppen Gallery - and now a book (her second monograph), which includes distinct cut-out shapes running throughout. "Each outcome was slightly different," says Sells. "The book gave me the opportunity to create an object out of the experience. I love the fact that allows for the viewer to interact with the pictures and create their own experience.

"Making a book like this is very much about following your gut, because you have no idea what it will look like until the end," she adds. "It is a journey in itself."
Flamingo by Chloe Sells is published by GOST Books www.gostbooks.com. More of Sells' work can be seen on her Instagram @studiochloesells or via her gallery www.michaelhoppengallery.com

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A hallucinatory take on wild desert beauty in Chloe Sells' book Flamingo

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"Seventeen years later and after all that life giveth and taketh away, it is the wildness of the region that attracts me most," writes artist Chloe Sells of Botswana, the place where she shot her latest book Flamingo.

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Thomas Albdorf I Know I Will See What Ive Seen Before

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Thomas Albdorf I Know I Will See What Ive Seen Before

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I Know I Will See What I Have Seen Before © Thomas Albdorf

The Austrian photographer took to the sprawling mountain ranges of his homeland to create an alternative representation of the country
Austria. The Art of Discovery To mark the launch of the competition, we spoke to Vienna-based photographer Thomas Albdorf, who will feature in a group exhibition of contemporary Austrian photography showing at Photo London 2018. is an exclusive British Journal of Photography commission supported by the Austrian National Tourist Office as part of their Austria. The Art of Discovery project. The winning photographer will travel to Austria to explore and document the regions of Linz, in Upper Austria, and Vorarlberg.
For many, a mention of Austria brings to mind images of sprawling, snow-capped peaks. Its picturesque, alpine landscapes have long been a symbol of the country in popular culture, politics, and art. From the backdrops of classic 1960s Heimatfilmes to the snowy peaks on Milka chocolate bars, mountains have become a central part of Austria's visual identity.

"We, as Austrians, construct our visual identity through those mountain cliches and, from the outside, we are also very much associated with them," explains Austrian photographer Thomas Albdorf. It was this observation that led the Vienna-based artist to take to the mountainous landscapes of his homeland for the series I Know I Will See What I Have Seen Before (2015). Albdorf's work encourages us to question the way we see things, and mountains, he realised, provided the perfect canvas on which to explore our perception of Austria and life in general.
Words: Hannah Abel-Hirsch
"The majority of Austrians actually live in urban areas and mountains aren't really something they encounter everyday; the idea of Austria as this mountainous place is very much a cliche," he says. For the Austria. The Art of Discovery commission, organised by British Journal of Photography in collaboration with the Austrian National Tourist Office, the winning photographer will be given the opportunity to explore and learn about two of the country's most diverse regions - Linz and Vorarlberg - meet with local artists, and create a body of work that captures the culture, communities and creativity they encounter.

Albdorf began to experiment with a more conceptual approach to photography while working on his graduation project Former Writer (2013), completed during his final year at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. The series documents found objects he photographed and then, through the wonders of digital post-production, edited to resemble sculptures. " People would ask me:'Are these sculptures or photographs, or photographs of sculptures?' And I would reply: 'Neither.'" Inspired by this ambiguity, Albdorf continued to work on projects that "explore the idea of what a photograph can be and how it can make us see things."
British Journal of Photography is also excited to announce a group exhibition of contemporary Austrian photography to be shown at Photo London 2018, supported by ANTO, as part of Austria. The Art of Discovery.
The first image in I Know I Will See What I Have Seen Before, an arresting panorama of a mountain range at dusk, resembles a classic landscape shot. But, as the series progresses, uncanny sculptural arrangements begin to materialise on grassy outcrops and strange rock formations emerge from cliff faces. Visiting different peaks in the Totes Gebirge mountain range, Schneeberg and Rax, during the day, Albdorf would return to his studio and appropriate the images using a variety of techniques. "It wasn't about photographing specific peaks, but about capturing a certain atmosphere in those abstract spaces that are also depicted on milk boxes, in presidential campaigns and popular culture." Rasterization, pixelation, multiple exposures, and the addition of constructions made in his studio, allowed him to transform these familiar scenes into visually unsettling photographs.

" You're familiar with those kinds of images. They look like the kind of photographs you know but then they're not," he explains. This duality of experience extends to the work as it appears in book form. As the images themselves encourage you to question what you are seeing, so too does the physical construction and layout of the photobook. The dust cover is made of a cheap and flimsy paper stock, which immediately subverts convention. The book itself is divided into three sections - Prelude, the "Bootleg Section," and Coda - with variations of the same photographs interspersed throughout.

"With all my work, I never have one version of the image. You see the image and then you see a repetition that is slightly different. Nothing is fixed, everything can be recontextualised," explains Albdorf. This approach is encapsulated by the work's title I Know I Will See What I Have Seen Before . The phrase is a play on a line from perhaps the best-known cinematic depiction of Austria, The Sound of Music. "At the beginning of the film Julie Andrews sings The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music, the most famous song of the entire movie, and there's a line ' I know I will hear what I've heard before,'" he says. "Flemming Ove Bech, one of the founders of my publishing house Lodret Vandret, suggested we change 'hear' to 'see' and found a phrase that sums up exactly what the project does."

Growing up in a small village 25 miles from Linz, the third largest city in Austria and a former European Capital of Culture, Albdorf was surrounded by the country's striking terrain from a young age. "There must be a reason I'm drawn to the Austrian landscape but it's tough to pinpoint," he says. "I've been thinking about it quite a lot. One reason why I'm so intrigued by nature as a concept must be because I grew up around it and was confronted by those kinds of landscapes every day."

Encouraging us to perceive places from new perspectives and, in doing so, asking us to question the way in which we see things, lies at the heart of Albdorf's practice. In a similar vein, Austria. The Art of Discovery will give its winning photographer the opportunity to explore the country and, in the process, discover that there is much more to Austria than just its legendary snow-capped peaks.

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Austria. The Art of Discovery is a British Journal of Photography commission made possible with the generous support of the Austrian National Tourist Office.

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Disrupting cliches in the work of Thomas Albdorf

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I Know I Will See What I Have Seen Before © Thomas Albdorf The Austrian photographer took to the sprawling mountain ranges of his homeland to create an alternative representation of the country Austria.

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A Palm Tree Is A Palm Tree Is A Palm Tree (Random), 2018

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What is "home"? Instinctively, the image of a peaceful haven comes to mind. A cocoon where one feels secure, loved, and understood - a nurturing and forgiving space. Home is sweet, "home is where the heart is." Home is family. It is a mother tongue-or multiple languages; it is comfort food and familiar faces, a beloved pet. "Home" is one's quotidian life, and domesticity: the coziness of one's living room, sofa, TV, books and memorabilia. "Home" is a set of coordinates: a house, a street, a town, a state, a country, an apartment in the city, a cottage by the sea. Home is where we were made. To some, it doesn't exist in the physical world any longer: it is a memory. Home is within oneself.

In 2017, sixteen Magnum photographers were invited by Fujifilm to reflect on this universal theme, in their own style and sensibility, with the same camera. "Home," universally known in English, was chosen precisely for its global nature, and for the inherently human sentiment that it conveys. The medium format, mirrorless camera to be used would allow for the discreet, sensitive, and intimate treatment the subject required.

This project provided photographers with an ideal pretext to explore a place they held dear, a familial landscape; it was an invitation to look both inward and outward. To some, "home" was the place in which they lived; to others, it was a welcome and peaceful return to their childhood memories. Some chose a distanced visual approach: photographing the geographical space of their home from above or from afar, through majestic landscapes, magical lights, walking through their streets in a Rousseau-like spiritual journey, or embarking on a deeply existential road trip. Others chose to focus on their family, past and future generations, taking this opportunity to draw a portrait of their babies as they were being born, of their aging parents, or their teenage children about to leave the nest.

These stories compose a beautiful tribute to family bonds, with all the joy, complexity and intricacies that they carry. In their elemental and peaceful way, they also offer a contemporary take on the historic exhibition "The Family of Man," which presented a humanist vision of the world after the trauma of World War II. Their photographs show us how dramatically the world has evolved since 1955, and, with it, the notions of family, home, motherhood and fatherhood.

Home - an inherently intimate and introspective subject matter - was also a formidable challenge to take on: for the past seventy years, Magnum photographers have predominantly been looking into the lives of others - and seldom into their own. While the camera is the perfect diaristic tool and the ideal medium to document intimacy, one's own or that of others, Magnum members' primary mission was always to be a mirror for their society. Street photographers, war photographers, most of them instinctively turned their camera to the Other - more often than not the Dispossessed, the Displaced, the Homeless. Many chose photography precisely because they needed to venture away from a home in which they felt they didn't quite belong: resilience meant rejecting it, traveling to other places, meeting other people - using the camera to escape.

For some, the difficulty of this project was rooted in a lingering feeling of dislocation: the fact of having more than one "home," and the yearning to document them all. Others chose not to settle in any one particular place, and had to search for their own definition of the word. To a few, the return to childhood was indeed an emotional endeavor, and "home" was therefore a surprisingly difficult subject to document; but for all, exploring the notion of "home" in such a personal way was a welcome challenge: an invitation to self-exploration, which resulted in a deeply thoughtful journey. Indeed, for these uprooted, avid travelers, accustomed to exile and a permanent state of in-betweenness, this project constituted a form of therapy: "I should be able to know where I come from." ( Moises Saman).

Together, these sixteen visual short stories compose a remarkably beautiful, poetic and complex portrait of what "home" is, and of what it can be. They encapsulate these profound and conflicting human feelings all at once: the inside and the outside, the pleasure and the pain. This project, envisioned in Tokyo, London and New York, takes us to over ten countries, and will travel extensively throughout the world after it premieres in New York. It is a testament to what a thoughtful collaboration can give birth to. In and of itself, through the wealth of diversity, talent and depth of Magnum, it exemplifies the power and quintessential role of photography in our societies: it touches us to the core.

And, in the end, as many movingly express here: for Magnum photographers, Magnum is home.
- Pauline Vermare, Curator, Magnum Photos

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What is "home"? Instinctively, the image of a peaceful haven comes to mind. A cocoon where one feels secure, loved, and understood - a nurturing and forgiving space. Home is sweet, "home is where the heart is." Home is family. It is a mother tongue-or multiple languages; it is comfort food and familiar faces, a beloved pet.

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Image by
Kelsey Maggart and featured with permission

When there's a will, there's a way; for photographers who know how to improvise and make the best of any situation, no "ugly" location is an unconquerable hurdle.

The 'Ugly Location' challenge-well known within the photographic community-has given rise to some impressive results. Joining this list are images from 22-year-old photographer Kelsey Maggart.

"I live in a really tiny town. If you want to be a photographer here, you have to make use of ugly locations," she explained to Ottawa Citizen.

From Target to gas stations, Maggart proves that with creativity and help, a seemingly "hideous" backdrop can be wholly transformed. One of her most popular set of photographs was taken at arts and crafts store Hobby Lobby.

She shared the behind-the-scenes, pictured above, through her Twitter, revealing how she managed to achieve the final photo with a little help from her friends.

Maggart adds that one of the perks of living in a small town is everyone knows one another. As a result, she's never been questioned about shooting photos on private property.

"When we went to Hobby Lobby, there were probably four or five workers. We went at 7:30 and they close at 8. Nobody said anything to us," the photographer explained. "I think when people see me, they can just assume I'm doing a photoshoot."

"I've had photographers message me saying they also live in a small town and they don't have good spots to go to, so they quit taking photos. After showing some of mine, they told me I inspired them to just go out and do it."

For more of Maggart's work, visit her Instagram @kelseymaggart for her final photos, @kelseymaggart_edits for her before-and-after shots, Twitter, and Behance.

[via Ottawa Citizen, images by Kelsey Maggart and featured with permission]

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‘ugly’ locations get wholly transformed into great backdrops for pretty photos - designtaxi.com

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'Ugly' Locations Get Wholly Transformed Into Great Backdrops For Pretty Photos - DesignTAXI.com

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Image by Kelsey Maggart and featured with permission When there's a will, there's a way; for photographers who know how to improvise and make the best of any situation, no "ugly" location is an unconquerable hurdle. The 'Ugly Location' challenge-well known within the photographic community-has given rise to some impressive results.

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Camouflage No.1 (Rock) and Camouflage No.2 (Water) continue some of the same threads from the Experiment in Landscape series but use the photographic object to blend into the natural environment. In Camouflage No.1 (Rock) a rock-like cape was produced using a photograph of a rock face in the Healy Creek area, and was then printed onto inkjet -printable textile and sewn together.

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These female photogs take better selfies than you

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These female photogs take better selfies than you

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Cindy Sherman, Petra Collins and Jo Spence: meet the original pioneers of the #selfie with this crash course in self-portraiture

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There are a good proportion of people today who would argue that anybody who posts a 'shameless selfie' on Instgram is basically a self-portrait photographer. In past decades the process, the meaning and the value of the self-portrait has evolved hugely, especially for female artists. Early examples like Claude Cahun introduced a hybrid of surrealism and gender experimentation into the art scene, while contemporaries like the late-Jo Spence used their images to document their personal battles with identity and illness. In honour of such revolutionaries, here's our breakdown of the most brilliant portraits by female artists.
CINDY SHERMAN
Cindy Sherman is renowned for her ability to transform herself - from black and white Stepford wife to multicoloured clown - the New Jersey-born photographer's ability to experiment with identity is most famously chronicled in her work "Untitled Film Stills". Shot between 1977 and 1980, her images can be traced back to her childhood where - feeling depressed as a young woman - the photographer would dress herself up as different characters as a form of escapism. It was only when her boyfriend at the time suggested she start documenting it did Sherman really see herself as a photographer; a step that transformed her into one of the most applauded visionaries in the world today.
POLLY PENROSE
Polly Penrose took self-portraits for several years before exhibiting them to anybody - first revealing them by entering a series titled "Nude" to a competition run by the London Photographic Association. Her first solo exhibition of nude self-portraits, titled " A Body of Work", was held just one year ago. A world away from the usual hyper-sexualised image of the female form, Penrose creates surreal images by fitting herself into the most obdurate of places and positions, calling them a "physical conversation between (herself) and the space". Using her medium to express her anxiety and mental health battles she faced after childbirth, Penrose's images provide liberation to women who feel ashamed with their bodies.
VIVIAN MAIER
Vivian Maier is one of the 20th century's most influential photographers, and also one of its most mysterious. Described as 'a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma', the American street photographer lived an understated life as a nanny to three boys and it wasn't until her passing in 2009 that anyone even knew Maier was a photographer. Leaving behind more than 100,000 images documenting Chicago life in the 60s, the images were unearthed when an art collector bid $380 on a box of her negatives and posted them on flickr, and they went viral. Preferring the street to the studio, it was there that she captured some of her most haunting self-portraits. The original pioneer of the mirror selfie, Maier shot in shop window reflections and retail mirrors, all of which added an incredible sense of depth to her photos.
HOBBES GINSBERG
Hobbes Ginsberg - recently interviewed and featured in the summer issue of Dazed - is a Los Angeles-based freelance photographer and member of cyber art collective The Coven. Although identifying as queer and pushing the gender dialogue forward through her work, Ginsberg admits she gets frustrated when the conversation about her photography ends there. Her work explores not only personal issues with anxiety and depression, but also her experience of evolving as a person and an artist. Adorning her portraits with beautiful, gaudy colours and an essence of punk, Ginsberg takes any negativity and channels them into her photography, creating something much more positive and transient.
FRANCESCA WOODMAN
Francesca Woodman, a Colorado born photographer of the late 60s and mid-70s, took her first portrait at age 13 and continued to produce around 800 more images until her untimely death at just 22-years-old. She is best known for her ghostly black and white self-portraits - a figure crouched in the corner or a blur across the lens - Woodman used herself as a tool to draw the eye of the spectator to a specific point in her images. Her techniques have gone on to influences contemporary photographers of today - including Cindy Sherman, who has been known to cite Woodman's work as inspiration.

IIU SUSIRAJA
iiu Susiraja has recently emerged on the Finnish photography scene with a distinctive take on self-portraits, focusing on creating the message that "the abnormal may be normal". Claiming that life is her muse, and calling her art a " playful anarchism ", Susiraja's self-portraits are wonderfully bizarre. Her series titled "Good Behaviour" exhibits her posing with a range of household items - from a broom under her boobs to baguettes in her hat - Susiraja uses her portraits to examine the relationships between women and the domestic home.
CLAUDE CAHUN
Claude Cahun was a French artist and writer who used her self-portraits to break down perceptions of gender, producing work as early as the 1900s. Ahead of her time in challenging ideals, she dressed for the camera, experimenting with the image of an androgynous woman, as well as feminine male - begging us to question the identity in her images. She rejected labels, even down to being called an artist, using her portraits to express this rebuttal of convention.

JO SPENCE
British photographer Jo Spence started her career in the 60s as a commercial photographer's assistant before shifting towards self-documentation. Two of her most jarring series, "A Picture of Health" and "Cancer Shock", exhibit some of the more raw and personal self-portraits in contemporary photography. Collaborating with collaborator, friend and now-owner of her estate, Terry Dennett, she used the camera to track the stages of her mental and physical deterioration after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 1982. Continuing to work right up until her death in 1992, she completed her collection "The Final Project" as a response to her illness. Within this, she produced portraits with undertones of death, expressing what she called the "unrepresentable."
PETRA COLLINS
Through this provocative self-portrait from her series "The Hairless Norm", Petra Collins explores why, when girls start to get hormones, develop boobs, and grow pubic hair, they are told to strip it all back and revert to a more childlike image of themselves. The American artist addresses this social discomfort with female body hair by displaying it, and evolving the image with layers of pastels, pinks, and silver, to create a dreamy portrait with an undertone of feminist politics. Collins also uses the medium of the self-portrait to tackle conventional ideas of the female image, as well as the taboos of teenage sexuality.
IRINA IONESCO
This iconic French photographer of the late 70s was the daughter of Romanian immigrants and circus performers. She emerged on the Parisian art scene with a range black and white images of women, then appeared to combine surrealism and erotica. All female figures in her work, whilst exposing themselves to the camera, seem to have a look of vagueness and of disinterest with the spectator. In her own portraits, she adopted the same eerie stance, creating an unnerving and evocative image for her spectator.

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These female photogs take better selfies than you

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There are a good proportion of people today who would argue that anybody who posts a 'shameless selfie' on Instgram is basically a self-portrait photographer. In past decades the process, the meaning and the value of the self-portrait has evolved hugely, especially for female artists.

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This Artist Captures How People React To Her Body In Public And It's Incredible

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This Artist Captures How People React To Her Body In Public And It's Incredible

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Haley Morris-Cafiero's work says a lot about society.

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Dressed in excess: people put on all their clothes

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Canadian photographer Libby Oliver's striking portrait series, Soft Shells, is a playful exploration of how people express themselves through clothes. It features individuals swathed in every item from their wardrobe, flashes of body parts only just visible. "Clothing is an immediate social cue," Oliver says, "and one of the few things we have visual control over with ourselves." The subjects range from Ava, four, to Oliver's grandma Florence, who is 88.

Oliver started the project last summer and now has people itching to get involved. She hopes the series can develop internationally, to explore other cultures and catalogue "the varying masses of clothing and textures in the world". She does, however, admit that the enthusiasm of her subjects has its limits. "I have to move quickly, because those piles of fabric are quite suffocating!"

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Dressed in excess: people put on all their clothes - in pictures

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Canadian photographer Libby Oliver's striking portrait series, Soft Shells, is a playful exploration of how people express themselves through clothes. It features individuals swathed in every item from their wardrobe, flashes of body parts only just visible. "Clothing is an immediate social cue," Oliver says, "and one of the few things we have visual control over with ourselves."

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Examples of reworked images

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all images by Kensuke Koike except the ones by me. You just try and guess which are which!

Saturday 5th May at the Arnolfini in Bristol is the date for this brilliant symposium on the archive with speakers including Francesca Seravalle, Maja Daniels, Charbel Saad, Thomas Sauvin, Kensuke Koike, and Amak Mahmoodian.

It's a serious bargain at £25 for the day and takes place in the wonderful waterfront location of the Arnolfini, with fantastic food, drink and cake all available within a few minutes walk.

Buy your tickets for ICVL's Activating the Archive here.

Not there in person, but there as a guest artist through videos of his artwork is Kensuke Koike. If you haven't seen Koike's cut-ups (are they collages, or photomontages when it's just the one work snipped and reordered) then do yourself a favour and head over to his website or instagram account now. They are just marvellous.

I can think of nobody who has given me more visual pleasure in the last few months than Koike. The clarity, simplicity and transparency of his work leaves me quivering with delight, eager to make my own versions - which have their own rough hewn charm I feel, and throw up new complexities such as what happens when you put together your collages in the wrong order.

I like to think of my versions as fitting into that childlike space that Picasso sought out so readily. But then I would wouldn't I. I think 'fumbling with a sledgehammer' is a better description, one that fits most collage that you see. Koike operates on an altogether higher plane with examples such as the man with the hairy eye coming out of collaboration with Thomas Sauvin who provided Koike with found images from a Shanghai photographer's album. And these Chinese images are of a very particular kind of image, with a directness and simplicity in their own right that serves Koike's practice so very well.

For some clarity on why his work is so clear and direct (and mine so obviously is not), here is a snippet from Brad Feuerhelm's piece on ASX. The images here are from Koike's collaboration with the equally brilliant and entertaining Thomas Sauvin who will be speaking in Bristol.

Precision cutting is an ability best left to mathematical minds. It requires a steady hand; a steady eye and demeanour unfit for those who believe in serendipity as a way of life. The hands that guide the minute impressions of the blade to paper work their way through the geometry of the printed image, slowly and with great mental architecture and meditation excise pieces of paper like teeth from the gums- ever so careful not to leave root traces on the edge of the paper it removes, nor the paper it leaves behind. What strikes the mind that is unable to fathom the precise cut is that the overall effort is but just one piece of the puzzle to be fabricated. These are cuts that become new weaves of a psychological cartographic delineation-each removal is a piece of territory to overlap with acuity of another terrain.

The gentle hands of Kensuke Koike are ones that I would like to examine. I would like to know if he shakes, if he drinks coffee or imbibes any such stimulant while making these incredible collages. He has one rule for making his work. Nothing can be removed and nothing can be added to the piece he works on. This means that in this optical effrontery it is mathematically observed well in advance of any cuts- as to cut wrong would mean that the next piece will not fit the portion removed and vice versa. This cool and calculating position presents any number of potential problems or errors once the blade begins to etch the surface of an image. So, when you look at these images, you have to understand the basic principal of the work, but also a mythical sacred geometric ability to render the form within an existing image of that which has been removed with an exactitude of skill much above that which most people are able.

The interesting thing is that behind this pleasure there lies a real depth of what makes a picture work, and the ways in which we analyse images. What exactly does happen when we flip a pair of eyes, what is it that renders a face suddenly outlandish, unattractive or downright weird, where does the recognition come from and when does it end.

This piece on Kensuke Koike and his pasta making treatment of the dog is a case in point. One notable thing about it is it's the only time I've ever thought of buying a pasta maker (you need some sponsorship, Kensuke, head to the pasta makers). More notable however are the comments that lead from Koike's quadruple dogs to the algorithms for image compression, and how image loss happens in the digital resizing of images.

These are from the comments on the post - I found this really interesting while being none the wiser by the end of it.

IceHippo73
Andrew Liszewski
3/19/18 12:36pm
I'd say it's a crash course on how image compression works, but close enough.
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1076
IceHippo73
3/19/18 1:51pm
But this isn't really how image compression works. Most image compression is done by binary compression algorithms, which work on any file type, so they don't deal with pixel manipulation.
Conversely, this is how a "resize" feature of an image manipulator would work. It does a little more, with adjacent sampling and averaging, but the base idea is there.
This shows how resizing an image to have smaller dimensions works, but it doesn't really show how compressing an image to have a smaller file size works.
To be fair, though, some image-targeted compression can be done this way, so it can be said to be similar to how image compression works, but I wouldn't call it a "crash course", given the circumstances.
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phutnick
1076
3/19/18 5:20pm
This is not correct. Most image compression (JPEG, all versions of MPEG) use the DCT to greatly reduce the entropy in an image. This comes at a relatively low loss of quality. (This is the "lossy" step.) Incidentally, this actually makes the image larger.
Then a lossless compression algorithm (e.g. Huffman coding) is used, as you describe, to compress the converted image. Because of the decrease in entropy after DCT, this ends up being much smaller than the result of applying Huffman coding directly to the original image.
What you are saying is arguably more applicable to lossless systems (e.g. PNG which uses DEFLATE), but still ignores several graphics-specific pre-processing steps. PNG specifically uses a "prediction" algorithm to cause the values to cluster around zero, which is similar to what JPEG does, except that you always end up with precisely the same values you started with after decompression.
etc
etc

Well I enjoyed it anyway. It's a crash course in something to do with Photoshop algorithms, but more interestingly it's an example of how old images and archives (and let's not even get into what an archive is - hopefully somebody will talk about that at the symposium) can be added to, adapted, and transformed by editing, cataloguing, contextualisation, revelation and concealment in multiple ways. And how these recontextualisations create a contemporary discourse from a historic one, and vice versa (and more of that later).

Read more about Kensuke's work at American Suburb X.

Visit his Instagram Account here.

Buy your tickets for ICVL's Activating the Archive here.

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Kensuke Koike and Activating the Archive

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all images by Kensuke Koike except the ones by me. You just try and guess which are which! Saturday 5th May at the Arnolfini in Bristol is the date for this brilliant symposium on the archive with speakers including Francesca Seravalle, Maja Daniels, Charbel Saad, Thomas Sauvin, Kensuke Koike, and Amak Mahmoodian.

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The subjects of John Myers’s photographs, taken in Stourbridge with a 5in x 4in Gandolfi plate camera between 1972 and 1979, were ordinary residents living near him in the West Midlands town where he lectured at the local art college

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The subjects of John Myers's photographs, taken in Stourbridge with a 5in x 4in Gandolfi plate camera between 1972 and 1979, were ordinary residents living near him in the West Midlands town where he lectured at the local art college.

John Myers: The Portraits will be published by RRB PhotoBooks on 21 April

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Portraits of Middle England - in pictures

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The subjects of John Myers's photographs, taken in Stourbridge with a 5in x 4in Gandolfi plate camera between 1972 and 1979, were ordinary residents living near him in the West Midlands town where he lectured at the local art college.

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Portraits with Braille. ‘Description of Jonathan’s Face by Jane’ forms part of a larger project called See You See Me.

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Sharing, surveillance, and data are changing the way we look and see

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Sharing, surveillance, and data are changing the way we look and see.

By Marisa Olson

In the fall of 2016, two American pop cultural icons became unwitting touchstones in the discourse surrounding the contemporary relevance of data. Naturally, I'm speaking of Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump, both reality-TV celebrities and entrepreneurs. Kardashian was the victim of a horrific gunpoint robbery in her Paris hotel room, only to be brutally victim-blamed in the media for her constant sharing of selfies containing metadata that might lead criminals to her whereabouts. Trump arguably stole the US presidential election by not only bucking the odds-as they had been laid out in predictive national-poll results leading up to Election Day-but also by carrying out essentially civilian psy-ops through contracts with big data firms like Palantir and Cambridge Analytica, whose official tagline is "Uses data to change audience behavior," and who were also behind the recent buyer's remorse-laden Brexit vote. While Kardashian's photosharing practices-a staple of her brand-came under heavy scrutiny, Trump's big-data battle was armed by info. The firms gleaned from millions of social-media users' online posts, from photos to text posts to likes.

In fact, today we are seeing a simultaneous and paradoxical blurring of the boundaries between photographs and their associated (formerly meta-)data, and between a media user/consumer's clinging to a right to privacy versus a tendency to rampantly overshare. This blurring-whether in the name of branding, neoliberal critique, perceived activism, social/familial bonding, or a desire to be validated, i.e., "seen" (given the Pew Trust's designation of the Millennial generation as that of "Look at Me")-somehow persists in aligning recognition with the scopic apparatus.

Make no mistake: The fact that I describe these simultaneous developments (one social, one formal/technological) briefly and in the same breath should not discount the fact that they are both epic in their ramifications and wholly different, even if their coincidence is worth exploring. After all, as artist and writer Trevor Paglen said in a "1,000 Words" feature in Artforum, the intervention of AI and algorithms into photography over the last decade has displaced the human eye in the act of seeing, and has become, in his estimation, "more significant than the invention of photography" itself.

When I think of a photograph today, I think of the actual image floating askew, like some intergalactic curtain, aimless over the liminal threshold between public and private. A steganographic decoy, the site of cathexisquadata for the photographer's or poster's (who's who again?) attendant fears and fantasies, mirror images of twin drives etched into the photo like a watermark in invisible ink.

We began to hear horror stories about this right after 9/11. Terrorists swapping JPEGs that were literal fronts for the cryptic messages buried inside the files. Meanwhile, the "if you see something, say something" administration was erecting a theater of security in which airport lines, public transportation, teenage bedrooms, online profiles, and selfie phones were all players in the newfangled Globe Theatre. Soon millennials and Gen Z social-media users were born, many after 9/11 or too young to remember a time before such visibly increased state surveillance in the name of "homeland security," for whom a "photo" was almost exclusively a digital object. This is the era in which reality-TV shows like Big Brother are no longer shocking outliers, but as my colleague Gene McHugh once said succinctly of postinternet art, the medium has shifted from novelty to everyday banality.

I would argue that we're in an era of photography marked by data ennui. Consider a morning in the life of my own media consumption: Yesterday I checked my email only to find a shockingly prescient promotional message with the subject line, "Is being online fun anymore?" Then I read an article about Roomba vacuum cleaners autonomously collecting data about their owners' home layouts and lifestyle. After this, I came across a well-received tweet by someone proposing that blood-alcohol levels and their GPS coordinates be collected on people's social-media posts. Finally, I read Paglen's article, which points out the politically repressive implications of machines attempting to "recognize" photographic subjects (their race, gender, and age, for instance) according to normative criteria. Somewhere in these scattered scenes, the concept of consent melts away in the hazy playtime of convenience and fooling around online.

Earlier this year, a study out of the Max Planck Institute quantified this data ennui in regard to the privacy risks that users take in posting photos, which are often at odds with their own stated privacy preferences or policies.They were able to identify sixty-eight categories of risk (far more than I think many of us typically realize-part of the point) in the form of information that machines are able to glean in photos. This includes details like recognizable geographic features in the background, a wedding ring suggesting relationship status, objects in the image that might indicate medical history, a child's hand holding an object that might indicate parental status, and many more elements to which people might not give a second thought. The study's authors were advocating for what they called a "Visual Privacy Advisor,"distinct from general, categoric text descriptors that could algorithmically recognize and warn users that images posed privacy risks. The machines could see better than humans or could be trained to care more.

Negotiating participation in image culture in an era of constant state surveillance and self-broadcasting is not easy. For the last fifteen years, there's been increasing pressure to participate in both arenas, to some extent. One is compelled to submit to surveillance "for the greater good," if not to participate in various layers of sousveillance- sous being the French counterpart to sur, a looking from below rather than above. Citizens' countersurveillance has thus only amped up in the six decades since the phrase "the whole world is watching" has been in circulation, following the rapid proliferation of cameras under the doctrine of media convergence.

It's not just the word photo that is up for redefinition today. There is a casual slippage between many of the terms we previously used to ground ourselves-in the art world, the sphere of computing, and in digital culture writ large. For instance, I've written previously about how one of the primary symptoms of network culture, in the post-internet era, is a slippage between the definition of transparency-as-visible in surveillance contexts to transparency-as-invisible in computing parlance.We also tend to conflate participatory art and participatory media, assuming equal levels of informed consent on the part of participants.

And that is the ultimate question raised above: to what extent are people informed participants in the sphere of photography today, and subsequently, in the world of image-embedded data? The participation question might be the easier half to address: there is a tug of war between a desire to expose and a desire to be protected. But to be informed feels nigh on impossible in the undertow of the theoretical singularity invoked by rapidly advanced encryption, AI, and surveillance technologies and their deployment.

Regardless of the everydayness or banality of the photos at stake (or perhaps because of this uncannyness), the more one thinks about it, the more one feels like the subject of a Hollywood virtual-reality production. The piece of paper, the screen, the pixel, the contact lens, or the neural implant stands in for the representation that is perceived to be not-there/previously-there/ there-not-there-whether it is ultra-high-resolution or the kind of "lossy-copy" Hito Steryl has called the "poor image" (a digital artifact accelerating toward a thing of the past; an accidental fallacy). No matter how generous one is in theorizing the materiality of conceptual or digital or performative or time-based or otherwise "ephemeral" media, we have to remember that it is not only image quality that distinguishes digital from analog; it is data, the code itself. The digital is always already a medium of doubles, if not duplicity-not necessarily because it is simple to forge, as we easily assume when we swap the term "Photoshop" for "digital," or forget how long predigital cinema carried out special effects-but because alphanumeric code is one language now capable of telling a story altogether different or adjacent to the images that overlay it.

Those of us interested in photography and new media have spent much of the last fifteen years theorizing and aestheticizing digital archives, but we would be remiss not to recognize that individual photos are now archives. That is, not just indices of their immediate metonymic namesake (the light that winked them into being, or the space/time event to which the photo bears an immediate, proximate, and consummate relationship) but also carriers (carrions) of whole libraries of information. Consider this in context of a society with ubiquitous image-making devices, where taking and sharing images is de rigueur. People are walking around with databases of databases of databases, ready to post them to public databases that will be hosted on other civic or corporate databases, for analysis by other unforeseen data firms, with unknown aims. The disparity of access to public and private information, the corporate colonization of the net that seeks to monopolize the space, and the looming legislative threats to net neutrality that hover over the landscape of cloud computing only compound this vista. Suddenly the once-novel concept of "database aesthetics" sounds not only trite but Pollyanna.

Artists and other supporters of the photographic arts (by which I mean good old-fashioned point-and-shoot, then print-on-paper photography) who are, at this point, still reading might feel that their practice has been sidestepped in this essay. On the contrary: One of the reasons I so related to the email that asked, "Is being online fun anymore?" is that I once made internet art, cofounded a "pro-surfer" net art community, and curated new-media art at a time when the internet felt like a more utopian, adventurous, less litigious, more neutral place in which the art we were all making had neither become co-opted by corporate channels nor was up for comparison (by us or anyone else) with social media. Likewise, I do not mean to cast "fine art" photography as a fledgling outlier kicked to the curb by the evil internet. In fact, I would invoke the French dramatist Antonin Artaud in arguing that in this era of questionable "truthiness" and threatened arts funding, the nation is in greater need than ever of the arts, if not art therapy.

Few people realize that it was Artaud who coined the term "virtual reality" in 1933, when articulating the concept of the theater and its double in his initial manifesto on the Theatre of Cruelty. Artaud wanted artists to show everyday viewers what was at stake; to create a moment in the middle of all the other moments of buzzing from here to there, one that virtually re-creates or doubles the everyday, but allows us to bifurcate and peel off our consciousness from the imitation-not unlike a nightmare that allows us to wake up from a worst-case scenario and be relieved it didn't happen, a sort of reverse wish-fulfillment.

I am not one of those who believe that civilization has to change in order for theater to change; but I do believe that theater, utilized in the highest and most difficult sense possible, has the power to influence the aspect and formation of things.

That is why I am proposing a theater of cruelty ... Not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other's bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly severed nostrils through the mail; but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And theater has been created to teach us that first of all ... But it should not be forgotten that if a theatrical gesture is violent, it is also disinterested; and that theater teaches precisely the uselessness of the action which, once accomplished, is never to be done again. ⁴

"Never to be done again" would be nice, but this, too, may be Pollyanna and reaching for the stars. Nonetheless, I like Artaud's idea of deploying the creative work to split use from uselessness and violence from healing.
Marisa Olson is an artist, writer, and curator.
This essay is adapted from Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self, now available from Aperture.

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Sharing, surveillance, and data are changing the way we look and see. By Marisa Olson In the fall of 2016, two American pop cultural icons became unwitting touchstones in the discourse surrounding the contemporary relevance of data. Naturally, I'm speaking of Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump, both reality-TV celebrities and entrepreneurs.

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We've created an A-Z guide because as modernist photographer László Moholy-Nagy once wrote; 'knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet'.

Though invented in the 1830s, it wasn't until the 1920s that photography came into its own as an artistic medium. Photographers began to embrace its social, political and aesthetic potential, experimenting with light, perspective and developing, as well as new subjects and abstraction. Coupled with movements in painting, sculpture and architecture, these works became known as 'modernist photography'.

A is for Alfred Stieglitz

Photographer, art dealer and publisher, Alfred Stieglitz is credited as one of the leaders of American modern photography in the early twentieth century. Revolutionary in his portrayal of still life and technical mastery of tone, Stieglitz called for photography's acceptance as an art form, as well as introducing avant-garde European artists such as Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brâncuși and Francis Picabia to America's art scene. Influenced by new developments in art, Stieglitz moved away from a more decorative, soft-edged 'pictorialist' style. His work The Steerage 1907, with its sharp focus and striking angles is often considered as a benchmark for the beginnings of modernist photography.

B is for Bauhaus

The Bauhaus was one of the most influential art and design schools in the twentieth century, a seedbed of nearly all the art forms we now think of as modernist. The Bauhaus existed in three cities: Weimar 1919-1925, Dessau 1925-1932 and Berlin 1932-1933, where it closed due to pressure from the Nazis. Its aim was to bring art back into contact with everyday life, so design and craft were emphasised as much as fine art.

The Bauhaus embraced new technologies. This was particularly evident in the photography department, where the celebrated artists László Moholy-Nagy and Walter Peterhans encouraged students to use their cameras to imagine new worlds and focus on experimentation such as close-ups and photomontage. As Moholy-Nagy stated 'everyone is equal before the machine ... there is no tradition in technology, no class-consciousness'.

C is for Camera Work

Published by Alfred Stieglitz from 1903 to 1917, the photographic journal Camera Work featured some of the most important modernist photographers of the early twentieth century. Stating that he wanted to create 'the best and most sumptuous of photographic publications', Stieglitz published the journal with the aim of promoting photography as an art form in its own right. The final issue celebrated photography as the 'first and only important contribution thus far of science to the arts'.

D is for Dora Maar

Dora Maar was a twentieth century photographer and painter. She worked across art genres and techniques including photomontage, darkroom experiments and abstract landscape paintings. During the 1930s, she built a successful career as a photographer in fashion and advertising, and travelled to Europe to document harsh social conditions. Her surrealist photographs, collages and photomontages made her one of the few photographers to be included in surrealist exhibitions. Her political beliefs had brought her close to the movement.

In late 1935 or early 1936, Maar met Pablo Picasso. Their relationship had a huge effect on both their careers. Maar documented the creation of Picasso's most political work, Guernica 1937, encouraged his political awareness and educated him in cliché verre, a technique combining photography and printmaking. Picasso painted Maar in numerous portraits, including Weeping Woman 1937 and encouraged her to return to painting.

By 1939 Maar had withdrawn from photography to concentrate on painting. These often reflect her environment. In Paris during the Occupation, she made still lifes with sombre colour palettes. In the south of France, her landscapes became more abstract. Maar returned to the darkroom in her seventies, experimenting with hundreds of photograms (camera-less photographs). Maar died on July 16, 1997, at 89 years old. Throughout her life she created a vast and varied range of work, much of which was only discovered after her death.

E is for Edward Steichen

Alongside Stieglitz, Steichen also pioneered the modernist photography movement.

Following the First World War, Steichen moved away from his previously pictorialist style and began to experiment with various techniques. He adopted a modernist style, incorporating elements of abstraction and a highly defined clarity within his images. These early experimentations helped to redefine and strengthen the appeal of photography.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Steichen worked as a fashion photographer for American Vogue and Vanity Fair. His soft-focus portraits of celebrities including, Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow, captured a romanticised vision of Hollywood; a mode still used today. Described by Vanity Fair 's editor Frank Crowninshield as one of the 'world's greatest living portrait photographers', Steichen became the world's highest paid lens-based artist.

F is for false cameras

Mounting a false brass lens to the side of his camera, American photographer Paul Strand would photograph his subjects using a second working lens hidden under his arm. Known as the candid camera technique, this allowed him to capture people without their knowledge. As the photographer describes, he wanted to make 'portraits of people the way you see them in New York parks - sitting around, not posing, not conscious of being photographed'.

From Jewish patriarchs to Irish washerwomen, Strand's street photography offered a drastic alternative to posed and formal studio portraits.

G is for Group f.64

Founded in the 1930s, Group f.64 was a group of eleven photographers, including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston, who were united by their desire to photograph life as it really is. Characterised by a clear, sharp-focus aesthetic, their style was at odds with the romantic methods of manipulating images during or after printing, fashionable at the time. Instead they focused on accurately exposed images of natural forms and found objects.

As cameras became more sophisticated, different effects could be achieved quite simply. By closing the aperture on the lens (like the iris of an eye), the focus of a picture was sharpened. The name f.64 refers to the smallest aperture on a camera, used by the group because it provided the greatest depth of field, allowing for much of the photograph to be in sharp focus. Perhaps the overarching vision of the group was their belief in the camera as a passive observer of the world, better able to depict life as it really was because it did not project personal prejudices.

H is for human form

The effects of the First World War saw a dramatic change in attitudes towards the human body. Previously depictions of the human body were largely either for academic study, used as reference points for painters and draughtsmen, or in pictorialist compositions in which the female body was typically highly aestheticised.

This was reflected in artists' and photographers' depictions of the human form. Modernist photographers experimented with cropping and framing a single body part, distorting and accentuating its curves and angles. In 1936, the philosopher Walter Benjamin compared the camera to a surgeon's knife, able to permeate the body by splicing it into fragments. As a result the body was often depersonalised, instead appearing as something unfamiliar, often almost plant or landscape-like.

I is for icons

The 1920s and 1930s saw a close relationship between celebrity portraits and fashion. Modernist photographers including Irving Penn, Man Ray, George Platt Lynes and Edward Steichen, photographed artists, writers, musicians and Hollywood stars including Salvador Dalí, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Jean Cocteau. Featuring in magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar, these portraits were instrumental in shaping the celebrity's public image. Rather than focusing on the sitter's occupation and status, the images were innovative in their pose, composition and cropping, as seen with Penn's corner portraits. Presenting well-known figures in unexpected or even abstract ways created iconic images rather than mere likenesses.

J is for juxtaposition

Modernist photographers enjoyed bringing together objects to reveal or create relationships between them. This can be seen in Tina Modotti's Bandolier, Corn and Sickle 1927 or Margaret de Patta's Ice Cube Tray with Marbles and Rice 1939. The result creates jarring or stricking compositions and heightens the texture and surface of each object.

K is for Kertész

Hungarian-born photographer André Kertész is known for his ground-breaking use of experimental camera angles and contributions to photojournalism.

Determined to establish a freelance career, he moved to Paris in 1925, gaining commercial success by publishing his photojournalistic work in magazines and newspapers across Europe. While influenced by the theories of surrealism and dada, he maintained an observational approach to photography, which he used primarily as a medium for documenting everyday urban life.

After being injured in the First World War, Kertész took up swimming while recovering in hospital. It was there that he first noticed the distortions that water creates on the body. Underwater Swimmer 1917 is the first of many distortions that Kertész took throughout his career and is credited by British artist David Hockney as the inspiration for his Californian swimming pool paintings.

L is for Leica

Released in 1925, the Leica camera was one of the ground-breaking technical innovations that expanded the development of photography during this period, revolutionising street photography in particular. It used flexible 35mm film - adapted from cinema film - stored on a roll. With a range of film speeds, it could capture movement and adapt to different lighting conditions, making it the ultimate handheld camera. Cheap, lightweight, and portable, the camera provided the opportunity for people to freely document their own lives. Not only did this see an increase in the popularity of snapshot photography, but also the rise of the amateur photographer.

M is for Man Ray

Man Ray's artistic career spanned painting, sculpture, film, prints and poetry, working in styles influenced by cubism, futurism, dada and surrealism. In 1930 he said that 'painting is dead, finished', and moved towards photography. He is perhaps most recognised for his use of the photographic method, solarisation and using photograms (developing directly onto photographic paper rather than onto film) which he dubbed as ' rayographs'. Creating surreal and experimental work, often of famous figures such as Lee Miller and Dora Maar, Man Ray became a key figure within modernist photography.

N is for New York

During the 1910s, New York was busy with people, carriages, cars and soaring skyscrapers and became the recognised symbol of change and modernity. Rejecting formal Victorian images, modernist photographers embraced crisp lines, abstraction in form and sharp focus, making the changing city the perfect subject. As Stieglitz commented 'my New York is the New York of transition'.

Due to this, the city played a key role in modernist photography. From its radical architecture to its varied population, it inspired many modernist images and served as a creative hub for many of its photographers.

O is for originality

The enemy of photography is convention, the fixed rules 'how to do'. The salvation of photography comes from the experiment
László Moholy-Nagy, c.1940

Modernist photographers sought to challenge the preconception that photography could not rival painting. They highlighted the medium's potential for originality, approaching it with a more experimental attitude and playing with ideas of abstraction. This attitude saw photographers harnessing 'mistakes' such as distortions and double exposures, and physically manipulating the printed image, cutting, marking and recombining photographs to create an often surprising, playful and radical image.

P is for Photo-Secession

Many historians date the beginnings of modernism in photography to the Photo-Secession, a group of American photographers founded by Alfred Stieglitz in 1902. Members included Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Käsebier and Clarence H. White, who all placed great importance on fine photographic printing and used techniques which mirrored paint and pastel. Their main ambition was to position photography as more than a popular pastime or commercial pursuit, and rather as a fine art. The results were exhibited in their New York gallery, The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, later known simply as 291.

Q is for quotes

Here are a few of our favourite quotes by modernist photographers:

It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realise them
Man Ray

The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man
Edward Steichen

R is for relationships

As well as formal artistic groups and schools, many informal collaborations thrived during the modernist period. These included both professional and personal relationships. Often the subtleties of these creative networks can be seen within portraits taken by the modernist photographers as different connections emerge. For example, student and teacher (Berenice Abbott and May Ray), muse and artist (Kiki De Montparnasse and Man Ray) and there are many instances of lovers (Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe, Man Ray and Lee Miller).

S is for Straight Photography

Modernist photography celebrated the camera as an essentially mechanical tool. Critic Sadakichi Hartmann's 1904 'Plea for a Straight Photography' heralded this new approach, rejecting the soft focus and painterly quality of pictorialism and encouraging straightforward images of modern life. Common characteristics of modernist images include clean lines, sharp focus and repetition of form.

T is for technology

After the First World War, technological advances became seen as vehicles of progress and change, to put the horrors of the 1910s behind them. Photography's association with technology and science meant that it appealed to avant-garde artists wishing to break with convention and explore modern life.

Developments in camera technology during this period also enabled photographers to capture movement. Previously, motion had only been suggested by the blurring effect of a long exposure or presented through series of static frames. Thanks to increased shutter speeds and roll film, photographers were able to easily capture the body in action. Figures were no longer forced to hold a pose. Instead they're removed from the studio and shown jumping, running and suspended in mid-air, with a clarity impossible for the naked eye.

The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.
Edward Weston, 1924

U is for Umbo

After studying at the Bauhaus, Otto Umbehr took on the artist name of Umbo and moved to Berlin. Focusing on images of the city and its bohemian society, his work quickly became part of Germany's avant-garde photography scene.

In 1928, Umbo became one of the founding members of the first cooperative photojournalism agency, Dephot. The agency was later closed by the Nazi regime. In 1943, Umbo's Berlin archive, containing between 50,000-60,000 negatives, was destroyed in a bombing. Very few of his photographs from the period survive today.

V is for viewpoints

Increased availability of the handheld camera in the 1920s enabled modernist photographers to explore viewpoints that flattened space and emphasised shape, tone, highlights and shadows. Championing what they referred to as 'bird's eye' and 'worm's eye' views, they experimented with angles and perspectives to create a distorted reality.

Do you understand now that the most interesting viewpoints for modern photography are from above down and from below up, and any others rather than belly-button level?
Aleksandr Rodchenko, 1928

W is for Walker Evans

American photographer Walker Evans was instrumental in establishing the American documentary photographic tradition. Working alongside photographers Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, among others, his depictions of rural and small-town life not only chronicled the realities of the Great Depression, but also positioned him as a key documentarian of the period. His photographs appeared in multiple publications, and in 1938 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, held a retrospective of his work: American Photographs.

X is for x-ray-like images

One of the darkroom processes practised by modernist photographers was the photogram. The process dates back to the development of 'photogenic drawing' by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1834. The technique involves placing objects onto the surface of a light-sensitive material, normally paper or fabric, and exposing it to light, revealing a negative representation of the object to create an x-ray-like image.

As attention shifted to lens-based techniques, the process fell out of fashion. However the beginning of the twentieth century saw a resurgence in its popularity and modernist artists repackaging the process under various names. Christian Schad's work became known as 'schadographs', Man Ray coined the term 'rayograph' and László Moholy-Nagy adopted 'photogram'. Simple to produce, this pared-back approach to photography had radical results.

Y is for Yamawaki

Born in Nagasaki, Japan, Iwao Yamawaki studied architecture at the Tokyo School of Arts, after which he joined a construction company. At the same time he began experimenting with a 35mm camera. In 1930 he interrupted his architectural career and enrolled at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, where he concentrated on photography. He engaged in techniques and processes promoted by László Moholy-Nagy such as combination printing, photograms and diverse viewpoints. In his travels throughout Europe, he documented details of modernist architecture and design. Although he returned to architecture once back in Tokyo, he continued to spread the Bauhaus philosophy as a teacher and through articles and exhibitions.

Z is for zoooooooooom

From cropping and zooming, to distortion and framing, modernist photography saw a radical shift in how we capture the world around us. Its lasting effects and spirit can be seen within the works of many contemporary photographers.

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A-Z of modernist photography. Discover 26 things you need to know about this period of photography

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Exhibition focusing on family photography

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Family Values: Polish Photography Nowis the UK's first exhibition focusing on photography from Poland and part of the Calvert 22 Foundation's season of events examining the country's visual culture and creative landscape. The exhibition is on until 22 July

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Home is where the art is: Polish family life - in pictures

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Family Values: Polish Photography Now is the UK's first exhibition focusing on photography from Poland and part of the Calvert 22 Foundation's season of events examining the country's visual culture and creative landscape. The exhibition is on until 22 July

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Exactitudes is our kind of culture. In 1994, photographer Ari Versluis and profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek started compiling and documenting bizarre, often unidentified subcultures. Here they share a brand new work and talk about style tribes now and then

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Gabberbitches - Rotterdam 1996

Ari and Ellie were initially inspired by "the whole gabba thing in Rotterdam"- picture a dozy looking lad with a number one buzz cut, wearing a shell suit. "We saw so many of the same clones that it was like the whole city was invaded." After that, the Dutch duo started observing people and their social uniforms and when they found enough of the same to fill a 3 x 4 contact sheet, they invited the mini-tribes into their studio and click clicked. Ergo twelve girls in tracksuits with over-plucked eyebrows; twelve auntie Sheila's - you know the sort; twelve grown-up tatted emos in snapbacks; and twelve gabbabitches in sports bras with half-shaved heads. It's like how some people will always say, "we're packed in here like sardines" in any given crowd, and others will roll their eyes. Most people fit a type, even if it's an atypical one. We're more like one in 400 than one in a million, and right now there are probably eleven other people dressed exactly like you, and one day Exactitudes will get you!

A seriously original collection of culture, Exactitudes has received its share or less of media coverage: i-D featured its creators in 2003, and 2005, and we saw them again at the Architecture Biennale in Venice, 2012. Laid out here are some of our favourites from their archive, as well as one brand new work: the grown-up emos.

Where do you go to find style tribes?
We simply focus on what we ourselves like to document: style and identity. When we work outside of Rotterdam, the new Exactitudes are always a product of intense observation, discussion and encounters, for a set period in a certain place. We aim to avoid short trends. A new series, a new tribe, should always make sense to the bigger story we like to tell. Recently new Exactitudes have been made in The Hague, (inspired by Dutch colonial heritage), Berlin (new skool tats) and St Petersburg (up-to-date high street kids).

Does a subculture start with one person?
We concentrate on uniformed identity, a blurring of difference, deliberate or not; individuals desire to merge, and at the same time feel individualistic. Over the age of 40, most older people stick to a certain style and have a rather fixed idea of who they are and what they want to represent. New styles and identities are fed by fashion, mass media, film, social media and especially cross-pollination between different cultures, genders and age.

Are there any styles or subcultures that you have wanted to photograph but couldn't?
Extremely religious [groups] are hard to portray. It takes an investigative journalism approach to convince them to have their picture taken in a studio. Young Muslim guys with non-branded Western sneakers and sport jackets; Orthodox Jewish youngsters in Antwerp with pipe curls... They take a very serious approach and you have to be very determined. Exactitudes is about the encounter and a willingness to co-operate, for the right photo to be taken.

Do you think a style, like punk or goth or skinhead, is a true representation of the person who wears it, and of their attitudes?
At that exact moment in their life, YES!

Do subcultures still exist? Has inspiration for the project become harder to find?
Subcultures do exist, but they're not that obvious anymore. In terms of fashion and lifestyle we have experienced a massive globalisation - democratisation of fashion, so people say. But it takes the edge off of practically anything new and leaves less space for real experimentation. Understanding the bigger social and political picture, on the other hand, can lead you to newer, smaller and more specific groups.

Do you collect anything else?
Collecting is fun and addictive, but having too much stuff is frustrating and dusty. Nowadays we love the "Cloud" feeling, and we tend to embrace a more non-materialistic approach to life. However, more of the same is still mighty attractive, especially when it is like our Exactitudes work, a never-ending story. And we collect i-D mags, from the first issue until now. Really.

What do you wear?
And what does it say about you? People don't change, but fashion does. So our personal style is a clean-cut look with ditto short hairdos. Can't escape the cyclical power of fashion. Styling is about the essential details, it's not the what but the how!

flatlandgallery.com
exactitudes.com

Credits

Text Sarah Raphael
Images Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek

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Gabberbitches - Rotterdam 1996 Ari and Ellie were initially inspired by "the whole gabba thing in Rotterdam"- picture a dozy looking lad with a number one buzz cut, wearing a shell suit. "We saw so many of the same clones that it was like the whole city was invaded."