Author: Willson Cummer

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

www.LeonWest.co.uk

My photographs illuminate an intimate experience with the subject.  Each photograph I take is depicted in clear, intricate detail, with forms, lines and patterns precisely arranged within the composition.  A consistent regard for clarity, tonal quality and the infinite nuance of detail pervades my work. This gives me the freedom to achieve the images I desire.  I create photographs where the light appears invisible — so as to neutralize its role in the appearance of things.  I choose to work in the intriguing beauty of shaded light as sunshine creates shadows, highlights, and accents on the surface that commandeer the eye.  Revering detail, tonality and clarity I decided to use a cumbersome 8″x10″ Deardorff field camera, a precision instrument that is based on early 19th-century designs.  The large camera with its formality is a device that grants my subject matter dignity.

— Leon West, Cardiff, Wales, UK

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Ber Murphy

www.BerMurphyPhotography.com

A neighborhood transformed by development is the central theme of this ongoing series, titled Sleeping Giant | 11101 Rezoned. Living and working in and around Long Island City’s defunct factories and industrial yards, where buildings are being raised and rebuilt into luxury co-ops at a head-spinning rate, I witness the methodical eradication of a working class way of life. I find myself dismayed by the quick progression of high rises that are erupting skyward along the waterfront; quickly, inevitably obliterating the view of Manhattan beyond. And yet, I find myself drawn first visually then socio-politically to the power these monoliths project set beside the defunct factories and old tenements: immense size versus outdated design, financial power versus fixed-income strongholds, and new possibilities versus old ideals.

For me, these images function not only as a record and homage to a vanishing place and time, but as metaphors for the workingman’s dilemma. They search for a dialogue between subjugation and advancement, and seek to illustrate the often-unsung sacrifices that are made in the interest of progress.

— Ber Murphy, New York City, USA

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Juande Jiménez

www.JuandeJimenez.com

The photograph above belongs to a series called Island, which is an exercise of exploration. Coming from southern Europe, the Caribbean island turns into an alien space, where everyday objects lose all meaning. In less than 20 square kilometers, we witness a parade of disconnected pieces: the signs of local history and the constant European and North American presence scattered throughout the exuberant jungle. The tropical paradise is still there, although partially hidden behind an infrastructure that no longer seems to belong to any particular place.

Landscape represents here an endless canvas; it is a concept by and of itself. In fact, the interactions that derive from the place and, therefore, from the images, do not matter. The place and the camera are both tools of personal research, almost biographical.

— Juande Jiménez, Malaga, Spain

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John Wellings

www.JohnWellings.com

In this project, titled Even the Mountains are Shells, I chose to focus on the idea of boundary and co-existence between the built and natural environment. I also wanted to convey a feeling of the relative isolation and the at times difficult way of life. With the traditional income streams gone and a heavy reliance on tourism the balance is finely weighted. It was only through repeated visits that I began to notice the subtle cracks in the tourist picture.  Things that a casual visitor wouldn’t pay a great deal of attention to I made my focus. The title of the work references the empty shop fronts, encroachment of nature and the notion of the land as a commodity, reliant on man to be re-imagined to another use. There is also an element of my own personal response to the area.  Having made a previous project (Cynefin) in the same place I wanted to see things from a different perspective.

— John Wellings, Swansea, Wales, UK

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Arturo Soto

www.ArturoSotoPhotography.com

This work is driven by the need to study the blinding normalcy of the present.

Blind Views depicts everyday urban scenes in different cities and investigates the ways in which buildings, signs, monuments and streets influence the way we live and apprehend our environment. I rely on the specificity of the photographic trace to reveal the political, historical and economic importance of these markers.

The series documents the visual infrastructure of spaces that come across as neutral, but that are actually heavily mediated by culture. I am also interested in the aesthetic transformation of a place by the mere act of picturing it.

— Arturo Soto, Panama City, Panama

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Miriam O’Connor

www.MiriamOConnor.com

Duplex, flat, pad, or paradise, the nuances of apartment life are a complex affair. This ongoing project, titled Complex, takes a personal trajectory and documents interior and exterior spaces of the apartment block where I reside. The images in the series take in to account the manner in which this living space is purposefully ordered or mapped out for residents. Here then exists an environment where inhabitants must always push doors, not pull, turn left, not right, lock gates, close doors, stay quiet, secure possessions. Occupiers seduced by potential garden spaces soon discover that such expanses are often only mediated from first or second floor windows, with such luxuries available in real terms to occupants who reside on the ground floor.

At the other end of the spectrum, the project registers the subtle tensions and forms of resistance frequently observed as I negotiate these spaces on a day-to-day basis. These clues are evidenced by the manner in which users attempt to personalise “their” space, or alternatively, often take shape and form in abandoned possessions scattered sporadically in communal thoroughfares. While such abandoned belongings plainly suggest a lack of respect for these collective spaces, they simultaneously present insights in to the lives of fellow occupants who are rarely seen and heard.

— Miriam O’Connor, Dublin, Ireland

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Paddy Kelly

www.PaddyKelly.net

These photographs are taken in locations that were used as IRA training camps during the 1970’s. There is a political and emotional ambivalence to what at first seem to be natural landscapes as they exist today, but which have fragments and traces hidden beneath the visible surface, disappearing from the landmark yet still flowing through the collective memory — surviving on a latent, unseen level somewhere between stasis and change… between wanting to remember and trying to forget.

This work looks at how a political situation can fuse with a physical landscape and asks to what depth it can tell us about past and present human experience. In doing so it reveals aspects of the social and political context of Northern Ireland, of intimacy and unease and of the highest and lowest peaks in the spectrum of human experience. It asks how an external environment can affect inner states of consciousness and how history can manifest and conceal itself within a place.

This project is an attempt to express and explore how feelings and personal experience can be communicated, to emotionally identify with my father and to connect on a different level. The work addresses identity, memory and place and asks how history is handed down from generation to generation, contrasting the “objective truth” of the photograph with the oral tradition of story telling — times and places become merged together with fragments of truth and multiple truths existing in one situation.

— Paddy Kelly, Belfast, Ireland

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Maxime Delvaux & Kevin Laloux

www.354.be

Leisure is a collective work realized by two photographers: Maxime Delvaux and Kevin Laloux.

Leisure is defined by the activity that we do outside the time taken by our usual occupations. It is the activities that we choose to do. Those are of all nature: cultural, sporting, recreational, etc. The idea of this work is to analyze the means used to practice those activities as well as the people involved in them. First of all, in a formal way, through the architecture of these places devoted to leisure and the sites in which they are established.

This work tends to translate into images the infrastructures and architectures developed by a state or a region, to promote a territory and to make a site attractive in a touristic or recreational way. This project is also about public and private places allowing the practice of a leisure activity. What importance does the city leave them, and how are they implanted in the urban landscape?

Further than this formal approach, it is interesting to analyze the use made of these places by people, and the way in which they make those places alive and their own. Photographing these people — in this particular context they have chosen to live — allows us to capture in them something real and personal.

— Maxime Delvaux & Kevin Laloux, Brussels, Belgium

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Huw Nicholls

www.HuwNicholls.com

My photographs explore synthetic elements that signify a human presence on the land.

The starting point for my research is the assertion that the landscape art developed from the 17th Century is a construct that quickly became established as the dominant method of experiencing nature. When this aesthetic is combined with the apparent realism of photography it both informs and reveals our attitudes to the environment. Mainstream landscape photography that often relies on the picturesque offers a dangerous vision of a timeless environment unaffected by people.

The featured picture is from the series Mega Structure — a collection of curious utilitarian buildings found in often quite picturesque locations around England. The purpose of these buildings is not always immediately apparent. Small in scale, and with little or no architectural merit, they simply seem to exist, and go largely unnoticed. Despite this they are very much a part of the landscape that we experience rather than some picturesque idyll.

— Huw Nicholls, Brighton, United Kingdom

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Sherwin Rivera Tibayan

SherwinRiveraTibayan.com

This project surveys the material presence of empty billboards and considers their capacity to comment on the environments that surround them.

For the last few years I have taken notice of and been actively searching for very clean, very white billboards, the kind that seem to present nothing but their own monumental physicality. Without the company of an advertisement to distract us, each billboard becomes an ambiguous fixture within the built environment, possibly indicative of economic and social collapse, but equally reminiscent of the potential dramas available to movie screens and unpainted canvases.

Above all, the project continues to serve as a visual response to the bewilderment in and confrontation of an object’s recovered material reality. It is only through the manifest blankness of each billboard that we encounter it — and possibly for the first time — as a physical object cast into landscapes of arguably equal emptiness.

— Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, Norman, Oklahoma, USA