Author: Willson Cummer

I'm a fine-art photographer and teacher who lives near Syracuse, NY, USA
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Dani Gherca

DaniGherca.ro

My project Traces of Fantasy is looking for present traces made by the ideological practices that underlay the development of the Romanian urban space during the communist era.

The state’s desire to transform the Romanian agrarian society into an industrial one, the depopulation of the villages and filling the new created cities with people, are the main instruments used by the government to concretize the utopian concept “The New Man.”

Architecture during the communist period becomes an instrument conditioned by the political discourse. The urbanization of the country had a very important role, because a community is much easier to control by the state if the people live in a city.

“The New Man” fantasy is based upon a projective model given that those who conceive it delineate it totally from the historical reality that they lived and which they considered damaged.

The belief that the equality between individuals must be primordial showed forth through the architectural equability. In this way were built the “bedroom neighborhoods.” The architecture became an instrument conditioned by political discourse.

— Dani Gherca, Bucharest, Romania

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Dave Hebb

DaveHebb.com

I’ve lived on and off in the Catskill Mountains for 25 years, and have been a homeowner several times over. However, the more experience I gain with land ownership, the less I understand it. I’ve witnessed my own relationship to the land shift from romantic reverence to selfish coveting to indifferent utility and have also observed the same complex contradictory feelings in my friends, family and neighbors.

By documenting the evolving landscape scenes from my everyday life, I am trying to reconcile my relationship to the land as I struggle to maintain a home and ecologically conscious lifestyle within a rural setting. The scenes I photograph are hidden in plain sight, often transient and easily dismissed, and yet in many ways they are the most concrete evidence of how changing behavior and attitudes, both individual and collective, can transform the landscape and shape our consciousness.

— Dave Hebb, Bearsville, New York

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Martin Friedrich

MartinFriedrich.com

These photographs are part of an on-going project entitled 295 Kilometers. From its source in the Karwendel range of the Alps to the mouth, the river Isar runs for 295 kilometers through Tyrol and Bavaria before reaching the Danube. While well known and appreciated for its recreational value, I set out to find and document the forgotten places, the hideouts and oddities along the river I grew up with.

— Martin Friedrich, Munich, Germany

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Jessica Auer

JessicaAuer.com

My first morning in Iceland, I alternated between each of the seven windows of my studio apartment, craning my neck to look up the valley, down the fjord, up the mountain slopes and around all the other houses. It was 10am and the morning light maintained a dark deep blue. As the day carried on, the sun never broke the mountains, but circled around the peaks – gracing only the tops of the opposing ridges with direct light. I was told that the sun would only find the town again in February.
 
This series is an excerpt of my visual diary from January, 2015, my first month in Seydisfjördur, Iceland. I spent 28 consecutive days wandering on foot within the limits of the short daylight hours.

— Jessica Auer, Quebec & Iceland

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Kinga Owczennikow

KingaOwczennikow.com

“The object to begin with is a window.”
— William Henry Fox Talbot, August 9, 1829

While being a wanderer by heart, as a photographer I am always drawn in by the sense of place as well as the space between myself and the sights which caught my attention at first. In this ongoing series, devoid of human figures, called Entities, I wish to combine the elements of recent, personal exploration of localities, the reoccurring motives, the underlying changes taking place in my life and the attempt to make a visual comment on our world and provoke fresh thoughts thereafter. I would like to convey the sense of both physical presence — the place and the psychological presence — the presence of the photographer, despite the fact of actual, visual absence.

— Kinga Owczennikow, Tirana, Albania

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Willie Robb

WillieRobb.com

Photographs of European passenger ferries arriving at the United Kingdom coastline form the project titled European Ferries. I wanted to respond to the recent decision Britain has made to leave the European Union.

Physically the images depict historical links connecting the UK to its current continent but that is subject to change. Metaphorically the photographs consider horizons and our divisive cultural attitude towards them. 

— Willie Robb, East Sussex, England

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Stéphane Dupin

StephaneDupin.com

For this landscapes series, called Origins, I wanted to come back to my birth area and explore the notion of identity through different authentic places.

This is a kind of documentary work and a feeling to discover again this deep country with another view. I spent two months, alone, in order to understand this isolated rural area.

Wildness is of course really present, as rough as the local identity. I like to capture empty places, sometimes abandoned. It seems to me relevant to describe an “out of time” environment.

— Stéphane Dupin, Paris, France

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Tracy Fish

TSFishPhotography.com

Chasing the Paper Canoe, published by the Athenaeum Press of Coastal Carolina University, was a collaboration of many individuals, including me.

This body of work was a contemporary photographic journey and historic reimagining of traveler Nathaniel Bishop’s 2,500-mile journey from Montreal, Canada to the Gulf of Mexico through eastern waterways during 1874 and 1875 on a paper canoe.

Chasing the Paper Canoe examined Chapter 11 of Bishop’s journal Voyage of the Paper Canoe, tracing the Waccamaw River in North Carolina down to the Winyah Bay-Charleston area of South Carolina.

While the river and people that Bishop encountered are no longer the same, it is necessary to be conscious of what once existed in order to understand what is there today. In doing so, there is an ability to establish a similar connection that Bishop had created along these river communities during his voyage.

— Tracy Fish, Reno, Nevada

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Babis Kougemitros

BabisKougemitros.com

In the series Unspoken Places I attempt to explore uncharted urban and peri-urban aspects of contemporary reality, with a glimpse that is mainly personal. Thus, the photographic depiction of the Attica landscape is neither objective nor representative. We encounter these landscapes quite often, we even cross them on a daily basis and yet rarely do we observe or take pictures of them. They are neither beautiful, ugly and definitely nor photogenic. They are not destined to be seen, except maybe as a blur through the car window or like a background to our daily routine. These places have no name and reveal no secrets to passers-by, they do not tell their story to “strangers.” These places are not tourist attractions. They owe their existence to human activities or failures; they owe their charm to their deafening silence and contradictions.
They constitute an alternative aspect of my country, the place where I exist.

Babis Kougemitros, Athens, Greece

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Alexandra Soldatova

AlexandraSoldatova.com

A Witness
2015-2016

In the town of N. there is a main street. After the war linden trees were planted in the holes that remained after projectile explosions and those who died during the bombings were buried in a mass grave. To the right of the grave there is a hill, one can even take it for the burial, however, there used to be an ancient castle here that was blown up 50 years ago to produce bricks for a club construction. Now this club can be found in N.’s downtown.

On New Year’s eve a huge Christmas tree is put just in front of it decorated with a garland. One day, under unclear circumstances, it was cut down at the height of 1.7 meters from the ground. Behind the club, in Stroitelei Street there is a kindergarten “Teremok” with a five-year old boy who got stuck between two trees not long ago.

The town of N. is located 40 kilometers from Minsk, the Belarusian capital. I come here rather often to solve various issues, but even more often – without any specific reason. It is always quiet here and it feels a sort of emptiness. This place is so close in its distance but at the same time so far away in a parallel reality. Everything stands still in a tacit collusion – nature and the space of the town, people and myself.

I am looking for a reason to come here again but whomever I address, I get the same answer, “there is nothing special around.” When noticing me, anyone I meet in this street looks like they want to talk, but the closer we approach each other, the denser the air becomes; this air makes us accomplices, brings us closer, but it does not let us speak the same language.

I do not learn anything new, I learn nothing at all, but I do go on shooting because it is my only shelter, my only excuse to be here, my permission to stare around. The camera seems to present me evidence, but what does it prove? My shots make me a witness. I am a witness of something that did not happen here, in the town of N., of something that remained in the air of my pictures.

— Alexandra Soldatova, Minsk, Belarus