Debora Schwedhelm / USA
From The Sea
In this series, I am exploring a sense of place and belonging. Being in the military system, my family often lives in a world of uncertainty. Untethered, without an anchor. The sea acts as an allegory of our lives, shifting and moving with the tides — forcing us to tread, swim and stay afloat through the changes. While I am photographing my children and friends, I am also photographing myself, moving in and out of focus, allowing the liquid world to illustrate my journey.
The photographs in this series were made in the waters of Florida, Minnesota and Asia between 2012 and 2016. The photographs were captured digitally using a Nikon camera and underwater housing. My prints are produced on museum quality fine art paper and are limited to editions of fifteen.
Anne-Sophie Guillet / France
Inner Self
In our society, we have very speci c expectations about the dichotomy of gender and the roles that each gender should adopt. However, this dichoto- my is not an exclusive point of view. I attempt to question this hypothesis by making portraits of men and women whose identities slip out of the norms. Through these portraits, I try to show that there are several ways of living our lives as human beings.
‘Body delineates an individual, it comes to confound itself with the external identity’.
Katsumi Saiki / Japan
Missing
It’s been twenty years since I left home, and I’ve been back just once in all that time. My family has scattered and I have nowhere to return.
This series of images was shot at the scenes of crimes involving the murders of children. With the older crimes, much of the information on the murder scenes and the places where the corpses were abandoned has been lost and it’s impossible to visit a precise location. Instead, I found myself thinking about what – if anything – has changed in the physical surroundings, and what – if anything – was going through the minds of the murderers when they committed their crimes; and, as I allowed my mind stray over this dense forest of impressions, it was as if each click of the shutter brought me closer to a kind of personal truth.
With time, it occurred to me that the images were no more than murder scene photos. At the same time, there were snapshots of lost scenery from my childhood home: I was photographing these landscapes as a means of restoring lost memories of my own childhood years, memories of that sorrow- lled place where I’d been trapped with nowhere to run to.
Now, In the current plan , the future , and I want to try entering divided more in the bushes . And I had to show and tell friends about this story, So I made small video.
Chan Dick / Hong Kong
Chai Wan Fire Station 柴灣消防局
It all began with serendipity and curiosity. I spent six or seven years in that workshop and the ventilation shaft of the bathroom had always been shut. The scenery outside had never caught my attention until one day there was this howl out of the blue, so I went over to the window for a look.
And there they were – firefighters enjoying a game of volleyball. It so happened that the bathroom window of my workshop looked right over Chai Wan Fire Station, and offered a vantage point for an omniscient view of whatever was going on down there: assemblies, washing up fire engines, pupils’ visits, volleyball games. That tiny window opened up a brand new chapter of a curious journey. At first I only peered down out of curiosity, and spent a month just prying, but the more I looked the more I was intrigued. Those frames just popped up in my head even with my eyes closed, and no longer could I bear to leave them untaken. The itch acted up, and once started, I just couldn’t bring myself to stop.
Guido Belli / Italy
The Weighing of the Heart
In the ancient Egyptian underworld, the hearts of the dead were said to be weighed against a single feather.
If it was found to be lighter in weight to the feather, the deceased had led a virtuous life and would go on the paradise.
Ville Kansanen / Finland
Liminal Bearing
Liminal Bearing is a performative video piece filmed on location at Mono Lake in California and the Sarcobatus Flats in Nevada. The work is set up to be ritualistic with the intention of recording catharsis as it happens.
People create emotional structures which guide their decision making and internal narrative. However, sometimes those structures become burdensome, disjointed, and their frailty is revealed. Jagged thought and emotional patterns ruminate in our minds, and paradoxically, we are unwilling to let them go, even when they rupture our interior landscape. I have attempted to perform an abstraction of this experience using a geometric — yet tenuous and unpredictable — wooden sculptural form, which I carry with care and difficulty until the water permits me to release it.
Ryotaro Horiuchi / Japan
Quiet Existence
Some of my relatives moved to a foreign country under the immigration policy in the prewar period, and have been living there as ethnic minority.
Hearing about their story from childhood, I’ve become intrigued by the issue of ethnic minority.
When I was living in Germany, the people living close to me turned out to be the Gypsy (Roma).
As I had no knowledge of them, their lifestyle looked very strange to me. I now know that they had established their own lifestyle as ethnic minority.
That experience made me have a strong interest in Gypsy culture; I visited Eastern Europe, where a lot of them are living, to take a close look at their daily life. I found that a strong identity existed quietly even in their isolated living, which aroused my great sympathy.
I believe that the identity of ethnic minorities will serve my lifelong interest.
Reiko Yagi
Slight Fragments
The traditional rhythms of Japanese life are still very much alive in the place where I was born. Shinto and Buddhism are both reflected everywhere, bringing the shape of Japan into view there, with all its severity and tolerance.
With the world caught in a whirlwind of conflicts, Japan is still not connected. This absence makes Japan a rare country which allows individual freedom. At the same time, I am afraid humanity might be losing basic sense of inheritance of nature being here in Japan.
I believe I can activate the unconsciousness of animals that sleeps inside us using a box with a pinhole and that will connects the subject by light with the emulsion.
Pinhole photos. It is the beauty and of richness in images to depict my hometown.
Miyo Ayumi
go-chisou
As I am a mother of 2 kids and a housewife, it takes long hours to cook for the family. Starting from thinking about menu and recipe, I go shopping for the materials and I cook. I arrange them on dishes, I let them eat. After the meal, I wash the dishes, I clean up everything on a table. I do this 3 times a day, 21 in a week, 90 in a month.
When I look into the tabletop after meal, I get sick of cleaning up. But the same time, I feel some kind of happiness. I think the feeling comes from proof of life that our family members eat, sleep, play and work all the time powered my efforts.
There is a life on a table and it is shown in a aftermath of meal ceremony.
Shyue Woon
The Carpark
Earlier this year during one of my counseling sessions, I was advised to keep a diary of my thoughts and reflections. A few weeks into the exercise, I realized my thoughts were better communicated in visual form than in writing or verbalization. Without the structural constraints of language, photography became a way for me to communicate with my inner-self, as it is more intuitive and open to interpretations. I feel safer to share my images to outside world, while keeping my inner-self intact.
At some point, I found myself drawn to the mystery gloomed by a dark, confining multi-storey carpark. With a hint of fear, I ventured into the void. I soon traced unexplained evidence that led to unsolvable puzzles. I don’t know what to make of my investigation, maybe this is how I interpret the carpark to be, a Purgatory, a space that is neither heaven nor hell.
Keijyu Kita
Máni
*Mani is the god of the moon in North mythology.
It was at a scheduled blackout right after the 3/11 disaster that I became interested in streetlamps, a motif in my work.
Looking up at the streetlamps that stood in town with no light on, I was impressed by their unique figures, which looked as if they were death masks of the electric light, an impression I could not avoid.
After that, irresistibly drawn to this motif of the streetlamps, I found myself single-mindedly taking their photographs as a portrait, overlapping those streetlamps
with the people who had influenced me as a persona in my life, my family and friends, people I got help from, and people I once gave my heart to.
When I think back on it now, it may have been that I was thinking about what losing the people who were precious to us really meant.
Ayaka Oku
The Past World
The theme is “The thing which I was seeing in childhood”, and the concept is my thought that “The human memory is carved in the space”.
The memory is carved in the space itself, and the memory wanders at the place as a shadow when we forget the memory staying there.
Children who are in ignorance of “to forget” can see the shadow.
We go through life keeping the past life as various forms, for example, to be bound by the past memory forever or to see only now and future without seeing the past.
There are many persons with various viewpoints in the world, and I would like you not to forget the shadows wandering somewhere today even if you are not a child who can see the wandering shadow.
Naohiko Hoshino
Point of View
“Time”. Every single men receive it equally, even in this modern world which is civilized and where everything is controlled by the widened gap. And photography has been existed as a tool to capture a moment. What I am experimenting here is to capture a bit of transitory of time into a photograph, and to carry out cubist experiment.
I thought that the planar continuity of time would be visualised as a solid.
Noboru Taguchi
Tele-Vision
Even in 2010s, TV is still a major mass media which transmits a bulk of information to an unspecified audience instantly. However, excessive information TV provides can easily overwrite people’s interest. The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which first triggered this project, is no exception.
This work aims to archive ephemeral sentiments, memories, and interests by accumulating single pictures of TV news footage taken with a camera fixed in front of LCD TV and further to deconstruct their withering process?namely, the transition from a catalyst of emotions to dusty documents.
Go Goto
Ningyo Jyoruri
Tara A Cronin
THE SUM AND ITS PARTS
I used to hate laughing. Not any laugh, but a joyous laugh, with others, that let my spirit free for a brief moment. I hated it because in the millisecond that I began to almost laugh, something inside would realize that if I began, that moment would soon end, and the laugh would be over, and the joy would be gone. Everything felt contrived, unfamiliar, far.
I found the connection between myself and others through the lens of Myth and Storie. I try to embrace what humans share rather than what divides us – these things are told through all forms of Storie. Whether passed on through written tale, a grandfather’s magical rant to a child, or through simple sayings that are engrained into our everyday lives whose etymology we barely know or question. I want to follow and embrace others’ lives through that lens of Myth way I do mine.
I find it fascinating this contrast we all seem to have – an unspoken agreement to almost ignore, because to bring it to the forefront would be to shatter our reality and our way of going about this Thing called Life. The contrast I speak of is the one between the world of the physiological/anatomical, and that of the spiritual/emotional/psychological–we have many names for this – I speak of the world of our experiences.
Though we are ‘simply’ a labyrinth of intricate vessels and veins, we are also pain and grateful joy. Though we are cartilage, exquisitely formed by the alchemy of Nature, we are also the richness that comes with age and with living Life. The Mind and Body were never separate.
Beneath our consciousness we are so much and yet something so seemingly unrelated – Beneath our Humanity, our Stories, we are just Blood, Sinew, Synapse, Myth, Bone.