group show 61:
Loss
About the Artists
Richard Aldred
Bio: Richard Aldred is a photographer with both commercial and artistic practice, undertaking mostly architectural, editorial, and documentary-style work. Lifelong influences include Maurice Sendak (illustration), Joe Colombo (industrial design), and Lt. Columbo (detective). His work has been published and exhibited worldwide.
Statement: The images represent different kinds of loss. The broader series of which the images form part are not about loss, though have a varied emotional pitch which includes it.
Bryan Anselm
Bio: Bryan Anselm (b. 1988) grew up in Michigan and studied photography at Western Kentucky University. He is a photographer based in New York contributing to The New York Times, Time Magazine and The Washington Post Magazine among others. He is represented by Redux Pictures.
Statement: Scientists regularly warn drastic changes associated with climate change in regional demographics and cultural psychographics will be seen in our lifetime. Climate disasters in recent years have caused exponentially more damage to communities, both in loss of life and economic destruction. On October 10th, Hurricane Michael made landfall in Mexico Beach, Florida, killing dozens of people and destroying nearly 60 miles of Gulf Coast communities. Thousands of people lost their homes due to the storm.
Nicole Bull
Bio: Nicole Bull is a Montreal based artist working in photography and video. She holds an MFA from ICP-Bard and a BA from the University of Vermont. Her solo exhibitions include Before You Go at ICP Studio Gallery in Long Island City, NY (2018) and here for you at the Frances Colburn Gallery in Burlington, VT (2015). She recently curated a group show To Know a Stranger at Baxter St at CCNY.
Statement: This selection of images speaks to a period of transition in my life and in my work. Taken in three different locations across North America, the pictures become a meditation on letting go. I am interested in depicting the everyday and the overlooked, and specifically how the things we leave behind can become symbols of a place to which we will never return.
Xiangyun Chen
Bio: Chen is a Chinese artist who lives in Brooklyn, New York. No one gave her a camera when she was 14 nor has she had extensive art training growing up. Shortly after enrolled in the college in America, she discovered the possibility of photography as an art form. Since then, she has injects her passions of poetry, philosophy and her Eastern root into her practice.
Statement: Chen is a Chinese artist who lives in Brooklyn, New York. No one gave her a camera when she was 14 nor has she had extensive art training growing up. Shortly after enrolled in the college in America, she discovered the possibility of photography as an art form. Since then, she has injects her passions of poetry, philosophy and her Eastern root into her practice. She enjoys daydreaming, looking out the window, as well as a cup of joe at a Greenpoint local coffee shop. Preferably, all together.
Lotte Fløe Christensen
Bio: Lotte Fløe Christensen, (b. 1979 in Ry - DK) holds an MFA from the Valand Academy in Gothenburg, Sweden and a BA in Fine Art Photography from the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. Her work has been shown in various countries and she has received work grants from the Danish Arts Foundation, and is also represented in this collection. She lives and works in Humlebæk, Denmark.
Statement: ‘The Rupture’ is an on-going series dealing with the fragility of existing in the world. An intervention with consequences. I have an expectation of something, of how things are, of how they are going to be. Here is what is. This is how it is going to be. And then the rupture. Where something cracks. The crack. The loss. The thing that disappears.
John DiJulio
Bio: John DiJulio is an artist who is interested in using photography to edit and manipulate common parts of daily life. Through these edits, mundane aspects of life are given a second consideration where their importance is highlighted.
Statement: I usually work in additive processes that don't leave a lot of room for loss or absence. The photos that I'm sending are images where I've deliberately obscured, changed, or removed information from the viewer to subtly shift the mood of the original image. It is my hope that the resulting images demonstrate that loss can be used to create more dynamic images.
Annelise Duque
Bio: Annelise Duque is a Utah based artist who works primarily in photography. Her work often uses the symbol of the garden as a grounds to seek for connection and healing. She is currently a BFA candidate at Brigham Young University.
Statement:Ever since losing my Filipino Lola I have yearned for her presence. My photographs provide a way to connect with her beyond the grave. To achieve this, I create elaborate sets that belong to neither this world nor the next, but at the threshold of both. In my work, Lola symbolizes connection to cultural identity and heritage, because as I seek to grow closer to her, I feel closer to understanding my own place.
Carolina Dutca
Bio: Carolina Dutca is a visual artist who is working with different media – photography, installation and public art, films, and video art. Many of Dutca's artworks are deeply personal - reflecting on her background, also some of them connected with topics of discrimination, domestic violence, xenophobia, feminism, and social and cultural stereotypes. Exhibitions and screenings of her works have been held in Czech Republic, Serbia, Germany, France, Romania, Guyana, Brazil, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Transnistria.
Statement: At home alone, my granny made earrings from old beads. Immediately after her death, I took both earrings and beads for them. I began to wear it and continued to create new ones. At her funeral, I decided to throw one of them into the grave, because I was very afraid of losing our connection. Since then, I wear an earring in one ear only.
Kristen Emack
Bio: Kristen Joy Emack is an educator and photographer living in Cambridge, MA. She has two long term projects that look at family, childhood and visibility. The series she is sharing here was an attempt to use her camera while dealing with the aftershock of a deep personal loss.
Statement: My best friend died in a fatal car accident when she unintentionally drove off a cliff and landed on the edge of the San Miguel River in a nest of twigs, rocks, leaves and feathers. I'm still trying to understand words like dead, death and gone in relationship to her. I used my camera for a year and tried to accommodate the nuisances of grief and long term denial in the face of sudden loss.
Olivia Fernandez
Bio: Olivia Fernandez was born in Bordeaux, France and studied at the International Center of Photography in the general studies as well as the documentary and visual-journalism programs. Her project Alone, in silence -a project about loss and solitude, won the PDNedu Grand Prize of the 2018 Student Photo Contest in the landscapes category and received honorable mentions from the International Monochrome Awards as well as the Analog Photographique and Life Framer Awards. Her on-going project Expired Life- about people who have tried to commit suicide, received a honorable mention in the 2018 International Photography Awards.
Statement: Alone, in silence is a project for my brother Guillaume, who died in an accident when he was 22. Alone, I drove across Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana and Idaho. In the silence and vast emptiness of those landscapes, I saw manifestations of the sadness and solitude I feel inside. It is easier to be alone and sad under the protection of darkness, so I turn the photos from day to night in the darkroom. The night acts as a space and a state of mind.
Fiona Filipidis
Bio: Fiona Filipidis is a Franco-British photographer working in London. Her practice is born out of collection, research, and empathic response. She looks for the image that happens before the actual taking of the picture – the escape to feeling. She is interested in nature, as well as the private worlds of the everyday. Fiona received her MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography from London College of Communication in January 2018.
Statement: I didn’t know how deep I had gone until I came up for air. I fell head over heels and rolled and tumbled and scraped my knees and bruised my elbows, rolled, rolled and rolled around some more until I was stopped by water and couldn’t roll any more. He branded my soul, weakened my walls and seized it all. It ended; an awakening. Velvet is a cathartic journey I embarked on as a way of coming to terms with the end of my first, overwhelming, tumultuous relationship.
Teri Fullerton
Bio: Teri Fullerton completed a Master in Fine Arts, from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She examines idiosyncratic topics ranging from vernacular photography, awe & the sublime, soldiers returning from war, military families and Internet dating. She has taught as a Lecturer at University of Colorado, Denver, Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and a Visiting Artist at Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Statement: Among the most interesting of insights provided by the snapshot is the universal nature of our history; you did yesterday what I do today. We find patterns and insights- or at least look for them. It is the search for meaning, from self-definition to the human condition. The end result is also a nod to a line from a Walt Whitman poem: “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
Marien Gadea
Bio: Marien is a middle-aged white woman who takes photos, lives in Valencia (Spain) and has a teenage daughter and a fat black cat.
Statement: This series wants to capture the confusion we felt when my mother died, the day we went to her house to pick up and throw several of her things. She liked having flowers at home and we did not know what to do with them.
Ashley Gates
Bio: Ashley Gates is a Mississippi-born photographer based in Florida. Her photographs documenting the American South have been exhibited nationally, most recently at the T. T. Wentworth, Jr. Florida State Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Griffin Museum of Photography, and Aperture Foundation. Her book of found Polaroids, We Didn't See Each Other After That, was exhibited at the Phoenix Art Museum and selected as one of Photo-eye's Best Photobooks of 2016.
Statement: These photographs document the dream-like experience of confronting childhood memory in the American South. I aim to capture the psychic landscape of a place both remembered and imagined as home.
Marieke Gelissen
Bio: Marieke Gelissen (1970) lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She graduated from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2012 and received a Talent Grant of the national art fund (Mondriaan Fund) the year after. In her work she explores the fysical relation with objects and spaces. This can result into video works, live performances, photographs and sculptural interventions. Her work was exhibited in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, UK, Switzerland and Japan. In 2016 Marieke Gelissen was nominated for the Theodora Niemeijer Prize for emerging female artists and awarded 2nd Prize. Since 2018 she is coaching art students at Gerrit Rietveld Academie.
Statement: Is it possible to get hold of time? To capture a specific period that was meaningful? To keep this time and to materialize it? These questions came to me after an intense experience of loss. And the questions made me start to carve a sphere from a piece of elm wood, by hand. It was physically demanding and time consuming. During the process my relation to the wooden sphere changed. I discovered that not the result of the act, the object itself, was important, but my relation to the object. How it felt, its size, its weight and how I could hold it. This is how the diptych ‘Something to hold’ came to be.
Lisa Gidley
Bio: Lisa Gidley lives in Portland and spends a fair amount of time taking photos and making other things. Her photos are unplanned; the search for them is part of the process.
Statement: This shot is from New York City, about a block from where I once lived in the East Village. It’s included in the 40-photo sequence “I’d Rather Be a Kite.”
Juan Giraldo
Bio: Juan Giraldo is a photographer currently living and working in the New York metro area; he received his MFA in May of 2015 from Columbia College’s photography department. He was born in Manizales, Colombia and raised in Paterson, New Jersey. His work explores the personal interior spaces of working people. He is the recipient of the Hopper Prize and A-I-R at The Center for Photography at Woodstock.
Statement: I look at my parents through the lens as of an adult who is now older than they were when they first arrived in the United States. Growing up in Paterson’s (NJ) Riverside section; in the shadow of New York City and Paterson’s declining industry and long forgotten silk mills. My family and I are first generation immigrants. My parents, Gloria & Ramiro Giraldo have now lived in United States longer than they did in our native Manizales, Colombia.
Conner Gordon
Bio: Conner Gordon (b. 1994) is an Indiana-based photographer and writer exploring notions of home. He is also the editor of EPISTEM, a publication examining the intersection between photography, ethics, and social change.
Statement: These photos are taken from Where Does That Flower Bloom, a project about the passing of my grandmother from cancer, the lakeside town she called home, and the uncertainty of pollution linking them together. By juxtaposing my photographs of Winona Lake with snapshots taken by my grandparents, I examine what it means to relate to a place and a person defined by loss, nostalgia, and the environmental degradation threatening to wash it all away.
Kathleen Hayes
Bio: Kathleen Hayes is an old-school surfer and skateboarder/visual artist and photographer from Long Island, NY. She works at the School of Visual Arts where she received degrees from BFA Photography, Art Education, and MPS Digital Photography. She does both documentary and fine art work which has been exhibited both nationally and internationally.
Statement: These images are from the series ‘T-Bone’. Shot in memory of my late father, Thomas Hayes, or as his childhood friends from Bellerose like to call him, T-Bone. These are his things.
Jamie Ho
Bio: Jamie Ho was born and raised in the sprawling suburbs of Fort Myers, FL. She received her BFA from the University of New Mexico and is now based in Madison, WI. Her art practice focuses on first and second generation American experiences and issues through the lens of her family. Ho has been featured in a variety of publications such as Booooooom, AINT-BAD, Don’t Smile, and Fraction Magazine.
Statement: The series, “Solace” is looking for comfort at a time of turmoil. My grandfather died on a Wednesday in July in China. I missed the funeral. A few days later, my partner and I attended the memorial of his grandfather who had also passed away. As his family found closure, I sought the same thing for my own grandfather. It was at that time I understood how closely entwined our families were going to be.
Peter Hoffman
Bio: Peter is based in Durham, NC and works in NC as well as Chicago and the Great Lakes region, where he is from. He makes photographs, collages and books that explore the relationships between people and environment. He is currently an MFA Candidate at UNC-Chapel Hill. His work has been featured by American Photo, National Geographic, VSCO, Time, CNN, Phaidon, Fast Company, The Huffington Post, Vice Creator’s Project, Juxtapoz, and others
Statement: On and off throughout my adult life I have photographed those that are close to me in suburbs of Chicago, the place I grew up. In 2016 my life took on a new direction as my wife and I left the area that we grew up in. Returning to my archives leaves me with fragmented memories of people whose lives I want to be a greater part of still.
Kevin Hoth
Bio: Kevin Hoth has been working creatively with photography for over two decades. He has exhibited diverse processes such as polaroid manipulations, digital manipulations, solo slideshow performances, and video installation art. He has taught college courses on digital art, photography, video, and graphic design at numerous universities. He lives and works in Boulder, Colorado and gets regularly woken up by coyote cries, owl hoots, and horse whinnies.
Statement: My longest relationship to date ended in 2009. I had suffered depression, but this was something far different. I felt my body tearing apart from the inside. I hit rock bottom. It was at this time that I really started making photographs – ones that described my world. Despite this severe emotional pain which went on for years, I will always be grateful that I found the camera in earnest to help me move forward creatively.
Ellen Jantzen
Bio: Ellen Jantzen was born and raised in St. Louis Missouri but now resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Not considering herself a "photographer" but an image-maker, Ellen Jantzen creates work that bridges the world of photography, prints and collage. As digital cameras began producing excellent resolution, Ellen found her perfect medium. It was a true confluence of technical advancements and creative desire that culminated in her current explorations in photo-inspired art using both a camera to capture imagery and a computer to alter and combine the pieces.
Statement: Losing Reality; Reality of Loss I am intrigued with how a person adapts to losses in their lives; how they are absorbed by events and changed; how they experience loss. In these images, I have placed my husband (Michael) in various environments where a loss of some sort has recently occurred. Some of the losses were very specific and personal and some were of a general, universal nature reflected in an inner state of anguish and eventual acceptance.
Henri Kisielewski
Bio: Henri Kisielewski is a self-taught photographer who works at the intersection of chronicle and fiction. His work is concerned with the dynamics that underpin everyday experience, with a particular focus on places and the people who interact with them. Kisielewski’s studies in human geography inform his investigation into the relationship between societal, architectural and geographic structures which produce the prosaic events he pursues. Henri’s work has been included in various group exhibitions.
Statement: “There used to be a wall here” involved tracking-down the former staff of a disused eighteenth-century hotel in London, and photographing them in the same spaces they once inhabited. The subjects had not returned in two decades and, in the staged portraits, they reenact a life they once had in a place they once knew. The project offers a meditation on the passing of time, and the changes - physical and psychological - that come with it.
Maria Kokunova
Bio: Maria Kokunova (b.1983, Armavir, Russia), independent photographer, visual artist. Lives and works in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. The problem of personality and the mechanism of subject constitution are the main themes laying in the sphere of her interests. In her works she focuses on the process of self-reflection and searches for visual metaphors to be used for examining her life in order to translate the emotional and psychological state into some visual form. Instead of forcing herself into a formal framework, she uses various visual modes and employs a greater variety of photographic techniques and styles to create a complete visual image.
Statement: These photos are from the Face project: the reflection on the mechanism of subject constitution. I cannot see my own face as a physical object. I cannot fully comprehend who I am as a human being. The whole world turns out to be an imaginary construct that are being built according to the existing system of cultural codes. My SELF is as much a result of such reality as reality is a generation of SELF.
Cindy Konits
Bio: Cindy Konits explores family history, memory, and identity with evolving technologies. She taught Photography and Video Art at Stevenson University, Maryland for 15 years. MEMOIRE INVOLUNTAIRE selections (2018) have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Cindy’s documentary short “The Way I See It” screened at 19 festivals worldwide. Two solo photography exhibitions were funded by NEA and NEH. Cindy’S Photography MFA from MICA was earned with a graduate fellowship. Her work is held in national collections.
Statement: Individual still-frames from 8mm family-film c1940 are enlarged approximately 10,000% with digital painting. Self-portraits are created amidst projected still-frame and installation of antique furnishings including 1950 RCA-TV, still-frame composited in screen, portraying Proust’s ‘Memoire involuntaire’, the operation of memory itself when recognition of the past is stimulated by details in the present moment. These selections from MEMOIRE INVOLUNTAIRE integrate authentic film artifacts with memory exploration, contemplating what we lose when film itself becomes an artifact.
Anna Korbut
Bio: Anna Korbut is a photographer and journalist from Ukraine. She is inspired by the landscape, portrait and report photography. Personal exhibition "Face of Islam" 2016 in Kiev, Vinnitsa, Sumy, Dniper, Cherkasy. Group exhibitions in 2019 "Maydan" Sweden, in 2018: "Surfaces" Italy, "Abandoned buildings" and "Travelers" Greece, CIP festival Greece etc. Finalist of HIPA 2018 contest. Photos and texts are published in magazines Mandry, Photographer, Family business, The first, FBN Ukraine, EdVenture, TIS, The mechanic etc; in books "Founders and heirs", "ControlPay: our success unveiled", "Sevastopol. The sea and ships".
Statement: States of liquid symbolize for me a not stable person, likely or able to change. The state of human consciousness, ready for change and transformation. People are lost in the huge amount of information around. Proximity to nature helps a person to maintain harmony.
Tomasz Laczny
Bio: Visual artist, photographer, author of photo books. Born in Poland, studied art, design, and philosophy. In his works he deals with complex issues of identity, belonging and connection. Author of award-winning photobooks. Shortlisted for this year's Gomma Grant. He lives and works in London.
Statement: This series deals with a notion of loss and absence. Unfolding the dream-like stream of memories the project deals with ghosts and traces which reality leaves behind. It is an intimate research of the relationship between love and death but also of the isolation of people.
Ben Lee
Bio: Ben Bowden Lee (b.1990) is an Atlanta-based artist and educator working primarily with found and appropriated imagery, text, and objects. Earning his MFA in photography from Georgia State University, his work has been published and exhibited with Atlanta Celebrates Photography, Atlanta Photography Group, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Aqua Art Miami, and Elsewhere Museum in Greensboro, NC.
Statement: "The Feeling of Being OK" is a series of poetically recontextualized imagery from unknown abandoned collections. Using the tension found in the enigmatic aspects of these materials, I investigate the fragility of the photograph and its capacity to fabricate memory and loss. Designed to be a meditation on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, this series focuses on themes including empathy and indifference, instability of identity, and life’s inevitable fate.
Georgia Matsamaki
Bio: Georgia Matsamaki was born in Crete, Greece. She holds a BA in Graphic Design and is a self taught photographer. Her engagement with photography began in 2012 focusing mostly on constructed photography. Her work has been featured in worldwide competitions and open calls. She currently lives and works in Crete as a graphic and set designer.
Statement: It’s been 2,5 years now that my mum is fighting with cancer. That was something that ignited a break up in my soul and an aggravation in my depression. The idea of losing her made me start taking peculiar souvenir shots of her and made me start wondering in cemeteries. All these, as an effort of negotiation with the sense of her absence. I’m still negotiating, I’m still not ready.
Andy Mattern
Bio: Andy Mattern is an Assistant Professor of Photography & Digital Media at Oklahoma State University and he is represented by Elizabeth Houston Gallery in New York. He holds an MFA in Photography from the University of Minnesota and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of New Mexico.
Statement: Bright Future interprets a collection of school portraits from the 1950s containing hand-written notes to an unseen young woman, Kathy. Some of the notes express hopes for the future, wry remarks, camaraderie, and others have no message at all. With each turning page, the front or back of a given photograph is revealed, connecting the face of the writer with his or her message. These pictures are interspersed with yearbook imagery from the same era, creating juxtapositions that question the allure of nostalgia.
Between fiction and document, this book offers offers a composite character and comments on gender, race, and power. Many of the written messages are upbeat and hopeful, even clichéd expressions that mark a rite of passage, high school graduation. Yet there are suggestive hints and darker undertones in the language and the image pairings. Kathy remains elusive, but the viewer is invited to join her inner circle as a voyeur.
Daniel Mebarek
Bio: Daniel Mebarek (b. 1993) is Bolivian-Algerian photographer based in Paris, France. He received his B.A. in Social Sciences from Sciences Po Paris (2015) and his Master in Media, Communication and Development from the London School of Economics (2016). After spending two years working at the United Nations Organization for Education, Culture and Science (UNESCO), he is currently pursuing a Master in Photography and Contemporary Art at l'Universite de Paris 8.
Statement: This selection of images presents different identity photos from my family album staged against the painting of a mountain. The portraits of my grandmother, brother and uncle interweave with the landscape of my home-city, La Paz. These images are a tribute to my family, the city I grew up in and the sudden loss of my uncle.
Nick Mehedin
Bio: Nicholas Mehedin (American, b.1993) is a photographer from Lumberland, New York. He earned a BFA in photography from SUNY New Paltz in 2015. Since graduation, he’s worked as a freelance assistant for photographers including Noah Kalina, Vincent Dixon, and Virginia Sherwood. Assisting on campaigns for clients such as Google, Toyota, and NBC.
Statement: I’ve been privileged to experience death only a couple times in my immediate family. When I was making these pictures, I didn’t know if the act was insensitive or defensive. But, months later, these images have really helped me process my feelings around the passing of my last grandparent. So often we shy from negative feelings and seek escape, but growth comes from both sides of the spectrum.
Kathleen Meier
Bio: Kathleen Meier is a french photographer based is Nancy. She is graduated to the artistic school Ecoles de Condé with a special mention from the jury for her work on the narrative potential in fine art photography. Her photographs are psychological. Through her subjects she reaches our mental activity, brings out our feelings, forces us to face our fears and desires. She appeals our imagination so that everyone have a full part to play in her work. In 2015, she release her first book ‘Hostilités sourdes’ at APR2 Publishing.
Statement: The series Huis clos confronts us to a suggestive confinement. What happens in us when we are faced into a desperate situation ? What does we feel when we have no longer a connexion with the outside world ?
The disorientation and the contact loss with the outside put us into a physical and mental isolation and can lead us in a conscious or subconscious way to modify, perhaps to alter, our relationship with the external reality.
This maze slowly conduct us into a mental illness.
Julianne Nash
Bio: Julianne recently received her MFA in Photography Video and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts, where was awarded the Assistantship Scholarship for two consecutive years, and the Alumni Scholarship in 2018. Julianne received her BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with Departmental Honors in 2013. Her work has been widely exhibited throughout New York and Boston. Julianne's most recent exhibitions include L'art du Partage, Saint-Paul de Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (France) and in the Place Title Here exhibition at the Plaxall Gallery in New York. She recently self published a handmade artist book of her work, Agglomeration, which can be viewed at the School of Visual Arts Library in their Artst/Rare Book Collection. A selection of Julianne's images may be purchased through the ArtFare App.
Statement: These two images were made after each of my grandparents passed away. Having been partially raised by them, their loss broke me. After my grandfather passed, my grandmother gifted me a bouquet of flowers "from" him in attempt to keep his traditions alive. I photographed it daily and eventually chose to stack all of the images together with an algorithm in photoshop in order to show the passage of time during a moment where time seemingly seaced. I used the same process on my grandmothers funeral bouquet a few years later.
John O’Toole
Bio: John M. O’Toole was born in Boston, MA and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. A photographer, writer, bookmaker, and founder of Oranbeg Press, his work explores the concept of familial roots through the lens of his Irish heritage. He received his BFA from Syracuse University in 2011 and recently received his MFA from the Image text program at Ithaca College in the Summer of 2018 as the inaugural class of the program.
Statement: "Attempted Thoughts" came about in a time of my life when I kept moving between one larger piece of work and several smaller shorter pieces. I felt lost, but I also created many orphans along the way and sought a way to parse them together and through the process began to take on its own form. A way I often describe this body of work is that its partly prose, a diary, a manual, an experiment and an autobiography.
Toni Pepe
Bio: Toni Pepe is an exhibiting artist and assistant professor of photography at Boston University. Her recent work tells the story of motherhood from the mother’s perspective – this is a point of view that has historically been dismissed. Becoming a mother prompted Pepe to make more deeply and has altered her relationship with time and making. She has become more patient and experimental in her practice and has embraced failure as both inevitable and useful.
Statement: Historically, motherhood has been viewed as a role rather than a relationship. It is a pre-scripted character that a woman is supposed to slip into, quietly abandoning her previous self for a self-sacrificing, silent and unconditionally loving figurehead. One of the most complicated and layered of human experiences reduced to an archetype, leaving little room for the flesh and blood mother to have authorship over any feelings that may stray from the ideal.
Sarah Pfohl
Bio: Sarah Pfohl uses photography, drawing, and writing to make work about place, teaching, and the body. She currently makes a lot of photographs of plants and is drawing a book about the vital role of mystery in teaching. Sarah hopes her work makes more visible some small, true thing that rests in the space between what something looks like or is dominantly known as and its oftentimes-much-more-complex actuality.
Statement: I photograph plants in retired stone quarries to witness large-scale, long healing. I live in a body that resists public expectations and create the images in this in-progress project as metaphors for my experiences of those daily violences my unruly body invites and to be hopeful, small, tender, and present on my own terms again and again, each time I fire the shutter.
Terrance Purdy
Bio: Terrance Purdy is an artist from Chicago, IL. He is currently a graduate student at SVA in NYC, getting his MFA in Photography. He loves anime, making pizzas, and dj'ing, and of course making art!
Statement: Ad Lucem, Ex Tenebris. Fight. Fight. fight.
Michelle Rogers-Pritzl
Bio: Michelle Rogers Pritzl received a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in 2001, a MA in Art Education from California State University in 2010, and a MFA in Photography from Lesley University College of Art, where she studied with Christopher James, in 2014. She has been widely exhibited in New York, New Or-leans, Fort Collins, Boston and Washington DC, as well as internationally. Pritzl was a Critical Mass Top 250 finalist in 2013, 2014, and 2017; she has been featured in Lenscratch, Fraction Magazine, Diffusion Magazine, Lumen Magazine, Shots Maga-zine, Your Daily Photograph via the Duncan Miller Gallery amongst others.
Statement: Not Waving But Drowning is a look inside an Evangelical marriage. These images show the truth of a life lived in the confines of oppressive gender roles, cult-like manipulation, and the isolation of Fundamentalism.
I use self-portraiture to share my own experience within the Fundamentalist Lifestyle without being explicitly autobiographical. My chosen medium of collodion used with contemporary digital media represents the outdated behaviors and rules imposed on women by Fundamentalism.
Andrea Rollefson
Bio: Andrea Rollefson is a visual artist & creative producer, based in Brooklyn, NY, currently living in Southeast Asia. Trained as an anthropologist, she often brings the investigative techniques of this discipline to her personal work and collaborative projects. Her photographic practice addresses considerations of memory, emotion, symbols, and metaphor.
Statement: Within these sets of images are layers of cultural and historical meaning but the motivation for these pictures was personal, reflecting phases in the recognition and experience of loss that can occur entering into, working to maintain, and then within the dissolution of a relationship, whether love or otherwise (but in this case, love).
Meg Roussos
Bio: Meg Roussos is a second year MFA student at East Tennessee State University. After earning a BS in Photojournalism from Ohio University, she completed the Triple Crown walking nearly 8,000 miles. Recent explorations reflect this cathartic journey which deepened her bond to the land.
Statement: The images I’ve submitted reflect loss through destruction. The loss of a home, a heart, a forgotten greenhouse, and a crashed vehicle. I stumble upon these scenes and heavily rely on the use of natural light to evoke emotion. These images of physical items could metaphorically be looked as my voice on the destruction of materialism and the loss of our connection to our surroundings and land.
Serrah Russell
Bio: Serrah Russell was born in 1986 and has lived in Washington state for as long as she can remember. After earning a BFA in Photography from the University of Washington, Russell sought to champion artists and form community and so came Violet Strays - an online exhibition space to promote artists locally, nationally and internationally through temporal solo shows on the internet. Russell has continued to exhibit her photo based work in solo and group exhibitions in the Pacific Northwest and in Vancouver, British Columbia; Melbourne, Australia; London, England; Athens, Greece, Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY.
Statement: These works are from a series called A-Mothering, dealing with all the various experiences of choosing to become or not become a mother, and the times when you don't have a choice one way or the other. To create these works I engaged in conversations with women, some who are mothers and some not, some by choice and others by situation. Not a mother yet myself, I listened to podcasts, read essays, and heard stories in person and anonymously sent from women regarding mothering and their own journey to it or through it. These stories and emotions informed the work greatly and acted as a personal research subject as I would soon enter into my own inner conversation on mothering, deciding later that year to seek to become a mother. After becoming pregnant and then experiencing a miscarriage, these works had acted as a preparation and a way of empathy for the emotions that lay ahead.
Ioanna Sakellaraki
Bio: Ioanna is a London based photographer originally from Athens. Her work suggests a constructed space of fantasy and loss. She has exhibited in three solo exhibitions and several photography festivals including Athens Photo Festival, Kolga Tbilisi Photo Festival, Retina Scottish International Photography Festival. She was shortlisted for the Prix Levallois and Urbanautica Awards. She was recently awarded with The Royal Photographic Society Postgraduate Bursary Award and nominated for the RBSA Photographic Prize in the UK.
Statement: Inspired by the origins of ancient Greek laments, I dwelled within traditional communities of the last female professional mourners of Greece looking for traces of bereavement and grief. Photography transformed itself into a question of becoming through loss and made the passageway within a liminal space of absence and presence. The images themselves lay between real and unreal allowing the viewer to believe in the real that is yet to come; another type of reality.
Buku Sarkar
Bio: I'm a writer and photographer from Calcutta and New York. My work has been published in Documentum Journal, NYT Lens blog, Huffington Post and various others. I'm working on a project with the residents of the largest Muslim slum in Calcutta.
Statement: Six years ago I moved from New York, back to my hometown of Calcutta. Six years ago I lost not only a city but also my body when I became very ill and unable to get out of bed. The trauma, especially as an ex-athlete, is something I cannot articulate. Perhaps that is why I took to photography. Words failed me, so I turned to the camera instead. Through this new medium, I rediscovered and became reacquaint with a city I had left 20 years ago. Every image I take is a reminder of all the things I used to be. Yet every image is a celebration of new belonging-- to a city, to the people of the slum.
Deanne Sokolin
Bio: Deanne Sokolin is a photographer who is interested in exploring identity in her work. Born and raised in NYC, Deanne earned a BFA at the Boston Museum School and an MFA at The School of Visual Arts. Her photographs have been widely exhibited and are in several collections including Harvard University's Fogg Museum. She has taught photography at Marlboro College, Princeton University, and The School of Visual Arts. Deanne lives with her family in Brooklyn.
Statement: "The Covering Series" explores Jewish identity via the mourning ritual known as siting shiva. The project was conceived as a way to contend with a personal loss by visually addressing the grieving process. The covered forms serve as personal symbols and are intended to evoke ancient aspects of the ritual that include the denial of vision by enrobing one's head.
Morgan Stephenson
Bio: Morgan Stephenson is a photographer currently living and working in Bloomington, Indiana. Her current work investigates the legacy of genetic memory and the inheritance of emotional wounds within family generations through the use of photography, digital manipulation, and textiles. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.
Statement: This body of work confronts the mother wound and its legacy of generational pain, emotional trauma, and fear. The mother wound begins as these emotional characteristics are instilled within an egg and sperm, forming a cellular memory that is inherited by the fetus. This cycle continues throughout life as we experience our own traumas and continue to subconsciously reenact unresolved emotions and actions that intensify the wound creating a heritage of emotional pain and tension.
Billie Stultz
Bio: Billie Stultz is a visual artist working with photography, video, and text whose work focuses on the relationships between intimacy, bodies, power, and representation. Drawing from queer theory and affect studies, her work explores the impact of social experience on personal, relational, and emotional subjectivities. Billie received her MFA from Yale School of Art and her BA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is passionate about supporting young artists and creative collective healing.
Statement: I made Jess’s Dress (2014) to capture the tender and tentative emotions underlying a relationship that was slowly ending.
Jane Szabo
Bio: Jane Szabo is a Los Angeles based fine art photographer with an MFA from Art Center College in Pasadena, CA. Her work investigates issues of self and identity. Using self-portraiture and still life as a vehicle to share stories from her life, her work merges her love for fabrication and materials, with conceptual photography. Szabo’s work is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles Museum of Art and the Museum of Art & History.
Statement: Family Matters is a deep look at her relationship with family, created as her elderly parents faced a daunting move from the family home into assisted living, a series of strokes, memory loss and the decline of their cognitive abilities. Using childhood possessions, and simple items that have been in the family for years, Szabo created tableaus that hint at complicated family dynamics. The presentation of these objects is not merely a catalog of possessions, but a catalog of feelings, of pain and disappointment, hope, loss and burden.
Zuzanna Szarek
Bio: Zuzanna Szarek is visual artist, photographer and screenwriter from Warsaw, Poland. In her art she searches for expressions of absurd, paradox and melancholia. Despite their documentary character, her photographs often reflect emotions.
Statement: This is the only picture I have of my Grandparents, Mom, Dad and me together. Granny died not longer after it was taken, Pops a few years later. I fear the death of my Mom and Dad. I fear the death of my cats. I fear my own end and take as many pictures I can.
Christina Thurston
Bio: Christina Thurston is an artist who works in photography, video, and poetry. Thurston graduated with her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2009 form the School of Visual Arts. Thurston will graduate with her Masters of Fine Arts in 2019 from Pratt Institute. Her work has been exhibited in the United States as well as internationally in Tokyo and Athens. Thurston currently lives and works in New York City.
Statement: Medical images are not intended for the patient’s gaze but for the doctor to interpret. Looking at my own medical imagery, I think of my mother, her body in the same position looking at the same kind of imagery. Being in the space of the medical allows me to start to understand what she experienced. Through the collision of the medical and family archives I attempt to show the meshing of our histories. The images I create allow me to have a dialogue with the past, a dialogue with her that is not possible in reality.
Tatsiana Tkachova
Bio:Tatsiana Tkachova is a documentary photographer and visual artist, based in Minsk, Belarus. She graduated from the Belarusian State University of Culture and Arts with Culturology degree (2010-2014), and from the Academy of Documentary Photography and Photojournalism " Fotografika" (St. Petersburg, 2015-2016).
She is currently working on long-term projects in documentary and conceptual photography and also experimenting with video art and multimedia projects, and is interested in the theme of «Women» in photography.
Statement: Two years ago, I learned from my mother that she had an abortion experience in her past. I began to ask her. Mom spoke reluctantly, almost in a whisper. Abortion” is a taboo word for many women in Belarus. The project tells several women stories who have chosen abortion as an option according to different reasons. “I allow you to shoot my back - no need to shoot my face” – only under this condition one of the heroines agreed to participate in the project. Almost all women took painfully even the very probability of face showing.
Guillaume Tomasi
Bio: Guillaume Tomasi (b.1984, France) is an emerging photographer and a curator based in Montreal. His photographic practice revolves around visual storytelling, focusing on people, places and memories. Tomasi is currently completing his BFA in Photography at Concordia University and he created in 2016 the collaborative project Fiiiirst which features anonymous image based discussions between authors photographers. He has been featured in various group exhibitions in Sheffield, London, Bienne and Montreal, and in international publications such as The Heavy Collective, Fisheye Magazine, AIN'T BAD, Phroom and Fotoroom.
He's currently available for photo based assignments/commissions.
Statement: Last year was the twentieth anniversary of my mom’s death. She was thirty-six and it was a Tuesday. I was in high school all morning. Everything was fine, my mother was healthy. At noon, we ate together with my parents, as we do every week. I left the house at two in the afternoon and, as I was in a hurry, I did not take the time to kiss my mother good-bye. When I came home late in the afternoon, the neighbor was there and asked me to follow her to her house because my mother had an accident. My father came a little while after, crying. It was first time I saw him break down. My mother had an aneurysm rupture. They flew her to the hospital by helicopter and during the next three days, my father went back and forth, from the hospital to our home. During this difficult time, I hoped that they would save her, keeping a picture of her in my hands. When my dad returned for good, he told me it was really over.
Crystal Tursich
Bio: Crystal Tursich is an artist who lives in Columbus, Ohio and serves as an Upper School Art Teacher at Columbus Academy specializing in photography. Previously, Tursich has held positions as a Lecturer at The Ohio State University and an Adjunct Instructor at Columbus College of Art & Design. She holds an MFA from Columbus College of Art & Design and a BFA from Adrian College.
Statement: Often drawing on memory and emotion, I create diaristic work that hovers between staged self-portraits and constructed memories. My most recent photographic series, In Silence, visualizes loss and the looming emotions thereafter. Upon suffering a miscarriage, I’ve turned to my camera to construct and document the moments connected to my experience. The resulting images serve as artifacts, creating a visual archive of loss and the accompanied complex emotions that cannot be articulated through words alone.
Veronica Viacava
Bio: Viacava’s interest predominantly gravitates around the complex relationship between photography and memory. Using objects as main subjects, she focuses on the sculptural side of the photographic medium while questioning the veracity of the image in the post-internet era. Currently undertaking her MA degree in Photography at the Royal College of Art, she exhibited her work in Brescia (IT), London (UK), Leeds (UK), Glasgow (UK) and Arles (FR).
Statement: Palinopsia (Greek: palin for "again" and opsia for "seeing") is the persistent recurrence of a visual image after the stimulus has been removed. My interest in memory stems from the death of my mother in 2010. I became aware of the futility of photographs as a way of preserving the past. While in the process of recalling faded memories, my father died at the beginning of 2017 transforming this project into my mourning process. Portraying simulacra that represent scattered family episodes, the items I photographed work as a surrogate to what is now absent. The incomplete narrative accentuates the incongruence between photography and memory.
Sloane Volpe
Bio: Sloane Volpe is a photographer and artist originally from Long Island, NY. She currently lives and works in Boston, MA after receiving her BFA in photography from Lesley University College of Art and Design (formerly the Art Institute of Boston.) Shooting both color and black & white film, her work ranges from themes surrounding mortality, to location focused shooting, to her autobiographical alternative process work.
Statement: Using the gum bichromate method as well as watercolors, wax, and blood, I work to come to terms with the ongoing trauma of my past as well as the loss of my own sense of self due to mental illness. Though the subject matter is severe, the quiet tones and delicate process reflect more of an internal struggle of the idea that, “everything is alright.”
Adrian White
Bio: New York based photographer Adrian White creates portraiture primarily dealing with memory, trauma and history from the perspective of people of the African diaspora. His goal is to connect with his ancestors by remembering the past, documenting the present and imaging a utopian future.
Statement: Grappling with its false allure of truth, I document the African diaspora in an effort to connect with my ancestors. History is manipulated, reconfigured to fit agendas. Photography is a malleable medium, shaping the world through lenses and biases. Their systematic extermination has been erased from history and silenced in classrooms. I remember them, I connect with them - so that we can begin to heal. I document the future. I remember the past. I imagine a utopian future. By connecting with my ancestors, I learn about myself. It is in the remembering that I believe that we can begin to heal. As evidence of how, when and where black bodies existed is erased. The remnants persist. My visibility is my weapon. My ancestors have scars and like the family photographs that I study and create those scars tell a story. Both love and loss exist in family photographs. That love and those scars are the reason I create my art.
Bio: Susan Worsham grew up in Richmond, Virginia. Her photographs are both poetic and deeply personal, drawing inspiration in equal parts from the artist’s memories of family, from the Southern landscape, and from the commingled confusion of sadness and beauty. Named one of the Oxford American’s “New Superstars of Southern Art,” her work has been widely exhibited in the United States, as well as internationally, and is held in private and public collections including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Do Good Fund Southern Photography Initiative. In 2015 she received both a Lensculture Emerging Talent Award, and a Lensculture Portrait Award. She has been an artist-in-residence at Light Work in Syracuse, New York, where her work was published in Contact Sheet 168: Bittersweet/Bloodwork, as well as a recipient of The Franz and Virginia Bader Fund. She was recently nominated for the Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer, one of the largest national awards among the grants and fellowships available in photography.
Statement: In this body of work I am coming to terms with loss. I have lost both my father and my mother, yet it's the suicide of my brother that seeps into my work like a slow forming stain, and has become a stand in for the others. My brother took his own life on his first visit home after severing his spinal cord in a motorcycle accident. What always comes to mind are the first few lines of his suicide note.
"I arrived home just about the time the honeysuckle blooms"
Russell was not the sort of person to notice flowers, so I find it really beautiful, and achingly sad at how poetic it was for him to stop and see the beauty around him if only because he knew it would be for the last time. Read more about this series on Susan’s website.
Rana Young
Bio: Rana Young is an artist and educator based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Rana holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln where she was an Othmer Fellow and a BFA in Studio Art from Portland State University. Rana launched www.PHOTO–EMPHASIS.com with Alec Kaus in June 2017. In collaboration with Kris Graves Projects, Rana released her first monograph, The Rug’s Topography, in January 2019.
Statement: "Lie and Smile" is an in-progress series through which I examine the fleeting relationship I had with my mother. Responding to her mementos, photographs and absence, I am able to construct prosthetic memories to reinterpret what I’ve learned of her life and embalm her death. Perhaps I’m attempting to render a version of her that I can confront; a version of her that I can forgive.
Toby Zeng
Bio: Toby Zeng was born in Beijing, China in 1998. At the age of 14, he moved to a boarding school located in California in a small town called Ojai. His passion for photography started to blossom when he began taking photos with his iPhone. In 2016, Toby started taking photos with a professional camera to shoot projects rather than take random photos. Toby is studying at Bard college under the photo department.
Statement: These 5 images I am submitting visually represents the feeling of loss. For example, the photo with a chair in it. The chair literally lost some part of its body.