Luís Aniceto

LuísAniceto.pt

Margem Sul is a project about my hometown territory on the south side of the Tagus river. Unlike Lisbon, where its political and economic prominence is also built upon its symbolic space, the territories on the south side lack this sovereign, historical and self-referential value in their urbanity. Suburbs were the most used adjective that pointed to a sub-value of its patrimonial reference.

It was in this set of urban places, a-historical and outside the spaces of power and desire, in which the processes of mutation and decomposition generated in the landscape a strange hybridism, that I decided to focus my work. Spaces in which anonymous buildings reign by the vulgar omnipresence of its facades, where cars, victims of accident and abandonment pose mute as useless statuary, but also places that have not yet been and are no longer, that seem suspended, unfinished and therefore renewedly liberating.

— Luís Aniceto, Almada, Portugal

Yiannis Trifonopoulos

JohnTrifonopoulos.com

Before Your Very Eyes is an idiom that means right in front of you, where you can see something very clearly.

This series attempts to bring out everyday details, such as small street corners, trivial things and various paradoxes, which, although they are in front of our eyes, we do not see.

— Yiannis Trifonopoulos, Kavala, Greece

Stefan Hagen

StefanHagenPhotography.com

One Thousand Steps

I record. I record my movements in nature; I record nature.

The photographic process has the unique ability to collect light. I use this with images exposed over an extended period of time: time determined by the space, by my experience in that space. 

While I often focus on the specifics of a place, exploring the momentous light and the shapes of a locale, the series One Thousand Steps focuses on my movement in a place. 

These images are created by exposing a negative while walking 1000 steps in a straight line, focused on one point, mostly the rising or setting sun, our primary source of light. 

While the locale of these walks is defining the colors and approximate shapes in the image, the image becomes also a direct imprint of my movement, the movement of the camera, over the roughly 400 yards I am walking.

— Stefan Hagen, New York City


Jan Töve

JanTöve.com

The images in my book Night Light are views of dormant small towns and communities during bright nights and dark days. A street lamp, an illuminated window, a neon sign or the light of a summer night sky that never completely fades out. And the opposite: the winter season, when the darkness is grafted onto days early.

Strolling around these night landscapes is a lonely walk. The empty streets, the deserted park benches, the parked cars, the silence, gives a sense that time has stopped, and that the surroundings await a new day’s life and movement.

When you then look at the illuminated windows, the glimmer from TV screens, the silhouettes of people, you are reduced to a viewer, a statist, without a role and a reply. You are absorbed by the darkness, you become a shadow, a stranger. A moth searching for light in a landscape that, compared to the daytime, completely has changed character.

— Jan Töve, Hökerum, Sweden

Tom McGahan

TomMcGahan.com

I Am Always Here

I’ve walked the banks of this river for as long as I can remember, looking for something, looking for nothing, looking for her. This landscape is forever changing with every tide, never knowing what it may bring: muddy salty paths never really going anywhere, no destination, no arriving, walk some and maybe more turn back towards home, refreshed, windswept, sunkissed, sore feet, dry mouth, made an image or two, sometimes none.

The Romans came here. Saint Cedd came converting the locals to Christianity from their Pagan ways, and Vikings in their long ships battled here — spilling blood of the local Saxon inhabitants. The local Earl Brythnoth lost his head and like many tales of defeat it became a battle cry of the underdog.

My parents came here in 1971. They both came from Ireland: Mother from County Wexford and my Father from Tyrone in the North. Like many before them looking for a different life, Mum was a nurse and Dad a ground worker, Not long after my sister Theresa was born. I came along in ‘73 and my younger sister Mary Louise in ’79. You could say we were the typical Irish family: Convent educated, Mass on Sundays and to the Pub after, we played here, cried here and made our stories. We too were underdogs.

On my walks along the banks of the Blackwater Estuary I would often meet other solitary walkers. This Landscape with its “big Essex sky” has a very meditative quality, almost featureless. It encourages you to look within. I’m sure as with me much soul searching has been done while trudging along the sea wall, down past Northey Island to Southey Creek, or on the North bank around from Heybridge Basin to Goldhanger or Old Hall Marsh and up to Salcott Cum Virley, and the Blackwater Estuary Reserve. It’s a place where you can get away from it all and walk for hours without seeing a soul, left to your own devices and the sounds of oyster catchers and the rush from a lapwing murmuration.

In 2001 my mother was diagnosed with type 3 breast cancer. It was a deep shock to us all. I was living at home after returning from a stint of working on cruise ships. Sadly mum lost her battle with cancer, like Earl Brythnoth on the banks of the Blackwater. She fought hard but eventually succumbed to her deadly foe. It took a toll on the whole family, which I don’t think we have ever really recovered from.

Mum held things together, she was a kind and gentle woman, great at listening and great at talking. She had a deep faith and was a devoted Catholic although she didn’t like people saying she was religious. I would have said she was a spiritual woman. One of my friends described her as a “ Real Mum.”

During the time of Mum’s treatments and eventual death I frequently walked those salty paths — usually accompanied by her wee Jack Russell, Snoop Doggy Dog — trying to come to terms with the great loss. It was my “go to” place, my retreat. I found something there, something that I had never really lost: a deep connection to everything, my consciousness spilling out from all of my senses touching everything it pervades. It came from nowhere. I wasn’t looking or searching for answers. I was just walking and looking, nothing special, no sitting for hours in the lotus position no navel gazing, although I had done quite a lot of both of those activities.  Christians call it seeing God in everything. Buddhist call it realizing your true nature. I personally don’t think you can put a label on it. It just is.

This Landscape imprints itself onto your soul, and likewise we imprint ourselves onto it.

These images are based around the ideas of solitude, introspection and transcendence.

— Tom McGahan, Tollesbury, Essex, United Kingdom

Vincenzo Pagliuca

VincenzoPagliuca.com

mónos is an ongoing project I started in 2015. Solitary houses along the Italian Southern Appennine stand out against the natural environment as monoliths. They are singular and magnetic architectures, photographed in the wintertime and with particular light conditions. They are places of dreams and meditations, which invite us to reflect on the symbolic meaning of the house for human beings.

— Vincenzo Pagliuca, Milan, Italy

Kinga Owczennikow

CargoCollective.com/KingaOwczennikow

Nature’s Gaze Within the Urban Landscape

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I photographed this recent, ongoing series in various areas of Albania’s capital, my current home. I aim to present viewers with everyday sights of natural and urban elements, in what appear as harmonic coexistences. The city vegetation, with its humble, yet ever-changing gaze, seems to show itself as a passing-by visitor to Tirana’s landscapes. I would like to believe that it patiently waits for a moment and an opportunity to take over.

— Kinga Owczennikow, Tirana, Albania

Andy Romanoff

AndyRomanoff.medium.com

The Mother Road

Route 66, the mother road, runs alongside Interstate Highway 40 as it crosses the country east to west. In my teens and early twenties I came to know 66 while going back and forth between Chicago and LA, traveling by car, bus and thumb. It was two lanes of asphalt then, carrying us through endless Midwest farmland, slowly giving way to the desert and its old west culture before we finally crossed the Colorado River into the palm tree’d wonders of California. It was thousands of miles filled with adventure and discovery for a green Chicago kid.



Traveling the road now, I glimpse the things I once saw fresh. Aged by time and removed from the present they take me back, and open the storerooms of my memory.

— Andy Romanoff, Los Angeles

Masato Ninomiya

Still-Life.jp

My Wintertag (winter day) series is about the winter landscape in Japan. It is an ongoing project, started in January 2014. These are photos at the foot of Mount Fuji and in my hometown (central Kanagawa prefecture, an area along the Sagami River).

Lake Yamanaka at the foot of Mount Fuji is approximately 70km distance from my hometown. Where I live it rarely snows, but Lake Yamanaka freezes every year.

In November 2016 it snowed for the first time in 54 years in my hometown. Lake Yamanaka is the source of the Sagami River and it is the only lake that empties into the rivers among the Five Lakes of Mount Fuji.

These landscapes are simplified by snow and I also tend to express simply and minimally.

— Masato Ninomiya, Kanagawa, Japan

Olivier Lovey

OlivierLovey.ch

In my Miroirs aux Alouettes series, begun in 2016, I create impossible images, close to surrealism, by placing stickers in public or an exhibition space.

By confusing the real and its double, I question the limits of image and representation. I revisit the notion of perspective, trompe-l’oeil and mise-en-abyme.

Originally thought to be photographs, my images also work as installations.

—Olivier Lovey, Martigny, Switzerland