group show 69
Photo for Non-Majors (Part 2)
About the Artists

Matthew Carroll
Bio: Matthew Carroll is based in Indiana. He grew up living in Latin America and in the UK before his family moved to the United States when he was fourteen. Over the last decade, he has also spent a significant amount of time in Southeast China. These formative life experiences engendered a keen interest in people, their culture, and their constructed surroundings. Through portraiture and landscapes, his work focuses on the daily happenstances of everyday life. 

Statement: My experience of living in different places has led to a fascination with people. This lies at the root of my curiosity about the environments people create for themselves, and how these inform their lives. This project explores the small, quiet, and quotidian narratives of everyday life. It examines the complex intersection that lies between the places we call home and how these shape dreams, personal realities, and expectations.

Melanie Carvalho
Bio: Melanie Carvalho is an African American photographer based in the Southwest. Her enthusiasm for photography was sparked at the age of 13 in a small dark room at Camp Martin Johnson in Michigan. Exploring what others find mundane, she uses photography as a way to liberate herself into the realm of beauty. “If you take the time, you will find something that is extraordinary. It takes slowing down and quietly observing the world around you.” 

Statement: During the pandemic, I was forced to ponder my place in the world as a person of color. I wrestled with questions of race in ways I never had before. My “History Revised” images are my way of exploring an alternative past in hopes of reimagining a better future. By combining archived public and personal photographs, I install black and brown bodies in places where they were not historically permitted.

Tamara Blake Chapman
Bio: Tamara Blake Chapman (b. 1997) is a photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Their work explores themes of tranquility, intimacy, and tenderness. Tamara is a self taught photographer and a recent graduate from The New School in the Journalism and Design program. 

Statement: These are pictures that I've made within the past six months of my close loved ones. Rather than concept driven I'm subject driven, so I don't really focus on specific projects but rather developing my entire body of work to emote similar themes.

Yvonne Dalschen
Bio: Yvonne Dalschen started with a degree in comparative literature. While raising her family and taking pictures of their activities, she started to take photography classes in non-credit programs at local universities and became a member of different camera clubs. She is now translating her interest in history and intertextuality into digital photography, looking at places and traces, working with different forms of layering and abstraction. 

Statement: Ghosts of the Manhattan Project is a series started during the pandemic. Living in a science community that was created during WWII, I hunted down the (accessible) remnants around town and layered them with historical images. Coming from Germany, the selective memory, hero worship and atomic nostalgia had always fascinated and alarmed me. Now I was exploring this unease and adding to the story with images that are made to disrupt and examine official narratives.

Thom Dough
Bio: Thom Dough (b. 1997) is a photographer born in Lowell, Massachusetts and based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His work explores the relationship between inner and outer worlds. 

Statement: The series Means and Ways is made up of two aspects: the public and the personal. The former aspect addresses my immediate surroundings: I walk alongside myself down city streets, Atlantic coastlines, and wooded paths. It is an act of surrender to the subconscious. The latter aspect is born out of my love for the melancholic nature of image making. They are my last ditch effort to hold on to that which inevitably slips away.

Malcolm Easton
Bio: Malcolm Easton pursues the idea that humble or unappealing materials can be transformed into artworks of interest. His engagement with photography began at age ten when he first encountered a stereoscope. Since then, he has explored several types of media including black-and-white Polaroids and 35mm transparencies. His technical background (degrees in Physics and Applied Math) led him to digital photography in 2007. His work has been shown across the U.S. and internationally. 

Statement: I collect small discarded objects, domestic artifacts showing longtime use. With these I create arrangements that exist only to be photographed. A single image may evoke overlaid memories of childhood and adulthood. Shooting indoors, I light with a handheld mirror, directing a sunbeam onto each arrangement and so producing illumination that is not fully predictable. When I move the mirror, moving objects leave multiple traces, recalling stroboscopic works of Harold Edgerton and Berenice Abbott.

Roger S. Echegoyen
Bio: Roger S. Echegoyèn is a visual artist/photographer born in New Jersey and currently based in New York City. Using a mixture of street photography and portraiture to create intimate narratives for personal, broad stories. 

Statement: “i hear a rhapsody” is an ongoing project exploring the concept of skinship in NYC. This series will reveal the intimate interactions individuals share in a public setting.

Marco Ferrari
Bio: Marco Ferrari is a self taught analogue photobooth portrait photographer. He got into Analogue Photography in the mid 2000s and over the years he took portraits of hundreds of people using machines in Europe, Australia and North America A vintage photobooth is his camera of choice because it's the best medium to put people at ease and get more natural shots if they're not used to pose. His motto is “GO ANALOGUE, DIGITAL IS DEAD”. 

Statement: In the INKED project Marco Ferrari takes photos of tattooed people and the art they carry on their skin. Every body type, age, race, gender have stopped in front of his lens to show different types of body modifications, finding in the photobooth a safe space of expression. The shoot becomes a performance, with the sitters slowly easing themselves into the process. Everyone is different as the unique photos produced by a photobooth are.

Tony Fouhse
Bio: Tony Fouhse is a self-taught photographer. His photographs are exhibited internationally and are held in many collections, including the National Photo Collection of Belgium, The Ottawa Art Gallery and The Art Collection of Global Affairs, Canada. His work has been featured in publications around the world, including The New York Times, British Journal of Photography, American Photography Annual and so on. He was presented with the Karsh Award for Photography in 2010. 

Statement: After the Fact is a sequence of photographs that point to the regression that's in the air, to our increasing uncertainty and fear, and to the changing political and physical climates we find ourselves in these days.

Mimi Fuenzalida
Bio: Mimi Fuenzalida, a self-taught Chilean photographer, discovered her love of images as a child. After moving to the USA in the 90’s with only $100, the affordability of digital technology finally made a photography career possible. She has pursued every opportunity to develop her skills and uses visual storytelling to cultivate empathy and humanity. Credits include Elle Decor, The Guardian, dailyphotograph and more and she has been exhibited at LACP. 

Statement: Working for the AIDS Ride I was committed to helping the suffering caused by homophobia and I also supported close friends come out where I saw how painful that process can be. In I Do, Still I sought to show Scottie and Marcy’s individual perspectives as Scottie transitions from husband to wife. I Do, Still is a visual story that transcends the limitations of culture, gender, situation and circumstance to illustrate the power of love.

Lauren Grabelle
Bio: Lauren Grabelle’s work falls in the matrix where fine art and documentary meet; where she can tell truths about our relationships to other people, animals, nature, and ourselves. Her work is about empathy. Lauren is a self-taught photographer with a BA in Anthropology since her parents wouldn’t let her go to art school - so on the side she took various photo workshops including studying with Nan Goldin, Ben Fernandez, and others. 

Statement: In March of 2020 I moved onto my partner's remote ranch in Montana. A 3-time U.S. Army combat veteran, he returned home to his 4th-generation family ranch a few years earlier to search for balance and peace battling the harsh, unpredictable forces of nature, while maintaining his love of the earth and its creatures. I am here now too, making images of comfort while searching for myself in a land that is not yet about me.

Larry Hallegua
Bio: Larry Hallegua’s photographs have been described as “bittersweet candid moments” and “fanciful characters frozen into bizarre activities”.They have been published in magazines such as Esquire, Fisheye, c41, Stern, Raghu Rai's Creative Image, among others and exhibited in Germany, at the esteemed Iserlohn Stadtische gallery, as well as festivals in the USA, UK, Italy, Australia, Turkey and Thailand. Larry has been a finalist in various competitions including Fotoura’s International Street Photography Awards, LifeFramer, as well as the winner of Magnum’s Swapshop contest in 2017 and the series winner of Bangkok's Street Photography Festival in 2020. He’s also a member of the Observe street photography collective. Without any formal background in photography Larry started his journey in candid photo taking after receiving a Henri Cartier Bresson photobook and a rangefinder camera in 2011. 

Statement: Pattaya beach resort in Thailand is well known for its nighttime sex industry, but during the daytime, tourists flock to the sandy coastline. The series is a colourful portrait of daily scenes and characters, capturing familial relationships, leisure time and a healthy dose of sun worshipping.

Lawrence Hardy
Bio: Lawrence Hardy is a 30 year old father to 1 boy named Asher. Lawrence lives in a small town in Northern Maine called Houlton. He is a self taught photographer/artist who started shooting with an iPhone and now about 2.5 year’s later he still shoots with his phone, but has picked up a Fuji XT3 and also started shooting film along the way. 

Statement: These photos are from Lawrence’s part 2 of his series “No Traffic Jams”. In this series Lawrence attempts to create art out of light, shadows, lines, and more with everyday objects that seem to get passed by everyday without a second look.

Meredith Heuer
Bio: Meredith Heuer started taking pictures when she was in high school in Detroit. Her step-father gave her a camera for Christmas when she was 16 and she hit the streets to make portraits. She continued to develop her hobby during college while working in a darkroom and upon graduating with a degree in French Literature, she moved to NYC to figure out what the hell you do with a degree in French Lit. 

Statement: My project was born in reaction to the disaster tourism photography that regularly surfaces from Detroit. I felt that these images were a very limited representation of what makes Detroit Detroit. It is the people who inhabit a place that give it life, so I began making portraits of people using Belle Isle, an island park on the Detroit river that I went to regularly as I was growing up.

Pratya Jankong
Bio: Pratya Jankong is a New York based photographer. He came from Thailand. He started interest in photography when he was in Agriculture program, undergraduate. His photography skills come from self-taught. He has been working as a photographer for 8 years. Mostly, his work is architecture, food and wedding photography. I have been fascinated and interested in fine art photography. He always explores and researches the new knowledge to enhance my work. 

Statement: Bed Checks began as a reaction to the governmental scrutiny of our relationship. Despite being considered the easiest way to immigrate to the United States, marriages like ours are subject to an invasive vetting process. To prove our innocence, a sceptical bureaucracy expects us to construct and document a relationship that adheres to an implied standard of heteronormative validity.

Neal Johnson
Bio: Neal Johnson is a photographer working and living in Louisville, Kentucky. His primary focus revolves around landscape and commercial architectural photography. With an extraordinary passion for traveling the country and structure, a discipline in photography became natural. Neal has photographed from the dessert southwest to Sweden and has participated in multiple solo and group shows around the country. 

Statement: Landforms is an examination of Iceland’s geothermal extraction infrastructure and its relation to the natural landscape. The way in which the structures have been designed, whether intentionally or coincidentally, have a mass and a volume and an aesthetic that echo the natural landforms around them. These photographs explore how natural and manmade landforms coexist in this unique environment while still and maintaining an egalitarian relationship.

Federico “Monty” Kaplan
Bio: Federico "Monty" Kaplan is an Argentinean film photographer. As a former filmmaker, his work is embedded with a strong cinematic atmosphere and storytelling intention. Monty is interested in using photography as a tool to question our ideas of certainty about what we perceive as real. Exploring the intersubjective space, where reality is formed from the relationship between our subjective experiences and the objective nature of the universe we inhabit. 

Statement: "The Measure" is a project that adapts Robert Creeley's poem of the same name. Using the text as inspiration, I created a sci-fi tale of a scientist, whose obsession with understanding the nature of time and the possibility to travel through it, drive him to madness. The poem speaks of feeling caught in the time as measurement and I present a visual clash between a pragmatic mind, and impossible limit.

Tira Khan
Bio: Tira Khan worked as a newspaper reporter until she had children. When her daughters were young, she wanted to keep telling stories, but in a different format, so she learned to shoot video. She began producing short films for non-profits. To improve her video, she enrolled in a photography class through her city’s adult education program. Today, Tira continues to enjoy learning, and often takes photography-related workshops. 

Statement: I find myself drawn to the idea of the domestic, but also repelled. Never has the tension been more clear than this winter, during Covid. The house became my family’s solace. And later, our prison. The pandemic caused a sense of chaos. I wanted to express this feeling through collage. I learned to print monotypes and polymer photogravure. I wanted to gather these disparate objects together and create, from those pieces, a cohesive whole.

Sabrina Konczyk
Bio: Sabrina Konczyk is a self-taught photographer working in Philadelphia, PA. A full-time law student, Sabrina uses photography as a channel to explore and critique the political realities of the world around her. 

Statement: This photo series explores the despair of everyday life. In it, I examine the reality of living in a hyper-individualistic, capitalist world, in which we find ourselves removed from any true purpose. The women in my photos are searching for a deeper meaning, through efforts such as self-reform, false gods, and embracing the butchery of society. Their efforts have been fruitless; they are left somber and disenchanted by a world not made for them.

Vinnoth Krishnan
Bio: Vinnoth Krishnan a colorblind photographer located in Midwest nebraska. 

Statement: My current series focuses on the Suburbs in the midwest where it always seems to be abandoned which creates a serene and isolated mood.

Yuyang Liu
Bio: L, documentary photographer, a W. Eugene Smith Grant finalist. 

Statement: My project focuses on the life of normal North Korean people and the undercurrent beneath the changes in the Korean peninsula even the world since 2018.

Maria Louceiro
Bio: Born in Porto, Maria studied Mining and Geo-Environmental engineering, but found herself loving drawing and photographing the mines a lot more than actually working in them. Currently works as a freelance Photographer and Art Director in Berlin. 

Statement: As a music photographer this year has been devastating. Concerts became a thing of the past. The places I would visit to find rhythm and melodies would close with uncertainty. In a time of restrictions I found myself drawn back to nature. Finding places around and isolating in my home country. For this project I capture musical moments of nature, connecting them with photos of concerts during what hopefully will be a rebirth of music.

Kevin Lyle
Bio: Kevin first became interested in art around the age of 12. Art class became the most interesting part of school. After one semester at the Cleveland Institute of Art he realized that art school was not for him. Collecting African masks and the process of photographing them for documentary purposes led to a broader interest in photography and the collecting of images. 

Statement: Series entitled "There": I am reminded of accounts of Medieval pilgrimages or quests where recognition of signs or visions served to inspire, inform or comfort the believers. Rather than dramatic manifestations, I seek subtle signs of human behavior or natural phenomena which evoke humor, irony or wonder. I also look for inanimate objects which seem to possess intent or juxtaposed objects which suggest something beyond their mere presence. Extraordinary/ordinary beauty.

Linathi Makanda
Bio: Linathi Makanda is a multidisciplinary creative who perfectly illustrates the intersection of inexperience and passion. She has blindly ventured into the craft of photography since she was a young girl traveling within the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Often travelling with her mother, she would capture landscape using the first phone she owned that could capture images. Since then, Makanda has used her the very things that hold her back to propel her and her work forward. She is passionate about the craft and equally passionate about making her lifelong learning experience. Her work has been featured and published both locally and internationally. Makanda is now based in Port Elizabeth, where she continues to experiment with the craft that is photography and videography 

Statement: Emotive is a series of images that explore the intimacy of feeling. Whether it is happiness, love, passion or indifference we feel, there is much to be unearthed within those respective emotions. Here, we dive unto those parts and define what it really means to take moments in and flow with everything that comes with allowing yourself to feel.

Xavier Scott Marshall
Bio: Xavier Scott Marshall was born across the street from Union Square Park, NYC and is a first generation Trinidadian-American. Raised in Brooklyn, Southern California and Pittsburgh, his curiosity for photography started at an early age while documenting his surroundings and preserving the fleeting moments of youth. 

Statement: Signifyin' is a series of contemporary reconstructions and interpretations of Biblical stories and the 16th century artwork that followed. My aim is to decolonize Biblical representation and elevate the "ordinary" perception of blackness to the divine.

Mikaela Martin
Bio: Mikaela Martin is an Australian documentary and fine art photographer, based in South Florida, USA. Before picking up a camera professionally, Mikaela was an actor and filmmaker. This work and practice is very much at play in her photography. She is interested in the ways we confront our own fragility and wonder; both from within, and through the people and spaces we inhabit. 

Statement: We meet on a kind of battlefield, Art and Mother; my daughters and I. There is a constant push-pull between love and resentment, which I’m sure I share with every mother, or mother figure. Amongst this longing for autonomy, the process of photographing my daughters always leads me to love, expansion, and wonder; away from resentment… perhaps because I am doing the very thing that I have been begging to be ‘alone’ to do.

Paloma Matias-Ryan
Bio: Paloma Lounice is an emerging photographer born in 1996 to Mexican and American parents and currently resides in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her photography explores intimate subjects such as family heritage and identity and memory as constructs. With a degree in Modern Languages and Intercultural Studies, Paloma has received most of her photographic training in Centro Fotográfico Manuel Álvarez Bravo and has participated in multiple collective exhibitions. Her multidisciplinary background has cemented a diverse approach to her work. 

Statement: The ongoing project Ramona is the first chapter of a series based on my family archive. These images explore intergenerational heritage, memory and identity through archival photographs presented alongside my own pictures. I take ownership of this archive and reconstruct my family narrative, creating, in this first chapter, an intimate portrait of my deceased mother and identifying that which binds and separates the women of three generations.

Yvette Meltzer
Bio: As Yvette Meltzer advanced in her child development and social services career, she simultaneously took photos of family, friends, clients and students as well as the rituals of everyday life. Captured by the magic and mystery of photography, she ultimately traded in her briefcase for a camera bag. Based in Chicago, Illinois, her fine art and social documentary photography reflect her interest in people, the narratives of thlives, and the environments that shape them. 

Statement: Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up -Pablo Picasso Through my 10th floor office window I was drawn to the interplay of color and light that fell on the Picasso sculpture. With a ringside seat to the plaza, I viewed the Sculpture as a playground where children exercised initiative, determination, confidence and courage while adults stood or sat at its base, deadened as Picasso described.

Nanci Milton
Bio: Nanci Milton is a photographic artist whose training began early in life, though not through formal classes, but the education provided by exposure to not only their own work, but that of artists, writers, and others . That exposure came through many hours in galleries and bookstores, but also many many hours spent watching and listening to them in person at casual lunches, dinners and more. She was encouraged from all sides to experiment with any medium, but found writing and photography her loves. Formal training began early in life, though not in formal classes, but through the exposure her artist/ teacher parents offered her through being surrounded not only by their own work, but other artists from all aspects of the arts began in early childhood though through being surrounded by artists. 

Statement: This series is titled "Heaven and Earth". In this series, ongoing, I am addressing the concept and pretext of freedom and containment in how we as a society look at death. We believe in a flight from earth to some other realm, and yet still many societies commit the deceased to the ground, or a crypt. Forgotten, yet preserved, where is the spirit to go? ongoing series, I am addressing the idea of freedom and containment in our concept ongoing series/ project, I am working with images that reflect a flight, albeit seemingly suspended, from earth and the containment of death in our society,

Walid Mohanna
Bio: Walid Mohanna is a New-York based photographer, designer and DJ. They were born in Beirut during the civil war and were bred on war sounds. As a queer person growing up in a conservative society and religious schooling system, they had to navigate difficult terrains that inform much of their work. Twenty years after their family opposed their dream to study photography, they decided to take up a camera and teach themselves photography independently. 

Statement: The series ‘Death by Palindrome’ was birthed by the explosion that obliterated my hometown, Beirut, last summer. Initially intended as a response to the blast, it grew into an attempt at mapping a genealogy of trauma at once personal, interpersonal, collective and transgenerational. These free-associative photo modules are mined from landscapes and portraits shot around the event, childhood photos, and appropriated uncredited images of the explosion and the Lebanese civil war circulated on social media.

Linda Morrow
Bio: Linda Morrow is a fine art photographer and book artist. Born and raised in Arizona, she lived and worked in Southern California all her adult life. She developed basic photographic skills by working in her home dark room for years before turning to digital art photography. She has made over a dozen handmade, artist's books. She found her art education in a rich patchwork of community college classes, Santa Fe Workshops and private crit groups. Her work is in a number of museums across the country as well as private collections. 

Statement: The series I submit here is called CARAPACE, and it speaks to a connection between the feminine and the botanical. On an afternoon walk, I found piece of plant material that intrigued me. I began to photograph it with a model and to explore the contrast between hardness of wood and softness of woman. I cut the portraits into pieces, re-photographed them on earlier photos of the palm sheath and created new layers of meaning. The images suggest an interplay between vulnerability and protection.

Lindelwa Msimanga
Bio: Lindelwa Msimang is a black South African contemporary artist that was born in 2001 February 16 at Edendale in Pietermaritzburg. Growing up Lindelwa loved art since primary school, but ended up having to do Civil in school. After high school she started doing her art again through photography. 

Statement: My work celebrates the masculinity within my identity. I' m more of a masculine female who has never been free to express my identity due to my surroundings. The spacious landscape that emerge on my work represent the freedom and peace that I've been longing for my entire life. The introduction of roses talks about the fragility and the vulnerability that one can find when they are longing for freedom of expression. My work mainly talks about the history of cameras and it' s also an identity mask representing me as a photographer.

Tommy Nease
Bio: Tommy Nease uses photography to explore the relationship between the natural world and the human psyche. He is a self taught artist who started at a young age and found his focus early on. He currently works for the US Forest Service as a Wildland Firefighter. 

Statement: These images are from Nease’s most recent series, Microcosm, which is an investigation into aspects of the human psyche which he believes reveal themselves in nature. He uses the human form, symbolism, manipulation, and his own observations in order to portray these sentiments.

Richard-Jonathan Nelson
Bio: Richard-Jonathan Nelson is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses textiles, video, and digital manipulation to create alternative worlds of speculative identity. His work is multi-layered, chromatically intense and mixes images of the natural world with reference to hoodoo, queer culture, and Afro-Futurism. He uses his constructed worlds to examine the overlapping spheres of culturally perceived identity and the emotional memory of what it means to be a queer black man. 

Statement: Via the heightening of inherent color and compression of both perceptual and conceptual space, this work examines the overlapping worlds of perceived identity and emotional memory. By manifesting an undulating fissure in the hallucinatory narrative of what it means to be a queer black man. This fissure is constructed through the conceptualization of hoodoo as a forgotten technology for cultural defiance and escape. Thereby exorcizing both ethnic and queer cultural limitations through the melding and depiction of shamanistic expanded ( mental) states with the subversive nature of the southern gothic.

Marié Nobematsu-Le Gassic
Bio: Marié Nobematsu-Le Gassic is a Japanese American photographer and artist currently based in Berlin, Germany. She works between her home-based darkroom in Berlin; New York; and Berkeley, CA, where she grew up and began analog photography. Alongside her independent, imaged-based practice, Marié studied Architecture & Anthropology at New York University and is now pursuing a Master’s in Sculpture as a DAAD Scholar at Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin. 

Statement: While looking for form and movement in non-dancers, I work through my own precarious history in dance and the impressions, perspectives, and/or inclinations that have remained although I am no longer connected to or active in a dance community. This series specifically brings together on-going portraits of a close friend and artist, Rachel Parks Liu, that began in 2016, and more personal investigations of figure in landscape and gestural details of non-human life.

Maalik Rahim
Bio: Maalik Rahim is a photographer based in Queens, NY. The majority of his work consists of a style he likes to call social documentation, a form of capturing streetscape scenes in a documentary style of photography. Maalik’s first experience with a camera involved being very curious about his fathers point and shoot film camera as a young boy. His father would often take photos of the family’s daily life; he also took photographs while vacationing. 

Statement: Maalik has an ongoing photography series called “Evidence of the Divine”. It can be viewed on his site. In this series he captures environmental, street portraits of people he crosses paths with in the streets. To Maalik these photos are both an affirmation of worth, and a celebration of life for these individuals.

Tina Rowe
Bio: Tina Rowe gave up drawing with pencils and started drawing with light as a way to process grief after the death of her father left her with a Praktika super TL 42 years ago. Photography provided a structured way of producing images that mark making was unable to do. Rowe's interest in process and method are as much a part of the finished work as the images themselves. 

Statement: Covid Commemoration: the arguments around identity and the pandemic have really interested me. My mother collected commemoration plates and thimbles and exhibited them at home as a kind of testament to her history and her reading of history around her. These objects are mine. In lieu of gallery space, I exhibited them outside closed shops and in public spaces during lockdown.

Nathanial Schmidt
Bio: Nathanial Schmidt is a self taught freelance photographer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin who works in commercial and documentary photography. He started photography to pass the time while unemployed and quickly fell in love with it. He learned the technical aspects by watching videos online as well as assisting more established photographers. 

Statement: Comrade' is an ongoing series, exploring the efforts of socialist, communist, and anarchist organizers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.

Nuno Serrão
Bio: “Nuno Serrão is a Portuguese photographer, interested in the dialogues between science and contemporary art. Each of his images considers how information is handled, shared, and perceived, framing scenarios as micro-narratives, demonstrating a sensitivity and a curiosity for the planet and its inhabitants.” Kate Simpson, Aesthetica Magazine, 2019 

Statement: Consciousness is an ongoing work of evolution. This unique ability to interpret life and the universe has no antidote.

Stephanie Shih
Bio: Stephanie Shih is a still life photographer, known for her painterly use of shadow applied to playful perspectives on food. Shih started making photographs on childhood road trips, but only took up photography seriously later in life while in graduate school studying linguistics. At the time, she moonlighted as a caterer, and translating the experience of food to the visual image has been a driving through line of her work ever since. 

Statement: The Eurocentric tradition of still life has long appropriated from cultures that it considered “exotic” while maintaining authoritative dominance on the practice. My on-going series, “Asian American Still Life,” claims space in this venerated tradition for Asian American experiences, both from my own Taiwanese-Chinese American upbringing and by working with Asian American small business owners. In conversation with the history of Eurocentric still lifes, these works examine allegorical symbology of the shared human condition.

Laidric Stevenson
Bio: Laidric Stevenson is a self-taught Dallas based photographer. Originally born in Wisconsin, he attended the University of Texas-Arlington graduating with a BA in Journalism and a minor in Sociology. He believes that photography truly shines as an art form when it is presented in the book format. Because of that he is a frequent self-publisher of small photo books and zines, mostly for himself, maybe one day for a Kickstarter campaign. 

Statement: After a period of inactivity, first from a bout of image exhaustion, then from adjusting to our new normal following the outbreak and nationwide spread of Covid-19, I began making photographs with my newly purchased 8x10 of scenes and signs of life post Covid.

Phillip Thompson
Bio: Three generations of Phillip's family worked at the Kodak factory, pushing vats of emulsion around in darkness. He was drawn to his grandfather's Nikon when he was a kid and eventually used this camera in college. Since then he has been acquiring other old cameras and equipment, developing film and printing on an enlarger at home. He is fascinated by exploring the memory gap between initial exposure and final print. He tracks time with photographs.

Statement: Trees cast a shadow like that of the sundial's gnomon: branches move across asphalt marking time's passage. Watching time pass through the same window in 2020, becoming aware of subtle changes in a fixed location, I realized how the window is an older cousin to the viewfinder. My relationship to trees in manmade settings through a manmade optical device led to these photographic meditations on how my shape corresponds with the shape of trees.

Madeline Tolle
Bio: Madeline Tolle is an American photographer based in Los Angeles. She grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, where she took one photography class during high school summer school. She attended the University of Illinois, where she majored in Art History. Following graduation, she bought a camera on a whim, and through a series of events that make zero sense, but also perfect sense, she ended up where she is today. 

Statement: These images are from a series entitled “Fly Fishing in Frogtown,” which is a documentary project, photographed during the pandemic, about fishing in East LA. The goal was to tell the story of this traditional outdoors activity against the backdrop of the built urban environment. It also aims to highlight the meditative beauty of being outdoors, even when the backdrop is perhaps overlooked and even polluted.

Konstantinos Tzavelas
Bio: Kostantinos Tzavelas (b. 1985, Athens, Greece) has worked for several years in the private sector, in his field of studies, as a structural works technician. During this period, he began studying literature, history and philosophy, attending related seminars and writing literature at the same time. In 2016, he began his undergraduate studies in the Philosophy and History of Science Department of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (EKPA), and for 2019-2021 year, was a student at in the Department of Photography at the Omiros Institute of Vocational Training Training. 

Statement: Polis | Konstantinos Tzavelas In this beautiful poem by C.P. Cavafy, we can understand the poet’s emotional state in that period. He is overcome by pessimism and sadness. He is trapped into the city (polis) and desires to escape the unpleasant reality. In the series of images that I present, I tried to understand the similarities with my own emotional state, during this period of confinement, due to the pandemic. The City | Constantine P. Cavafy You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one. Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong and my heart lies buried like something dead. How long can I let my mind moulder in this place? Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.” You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. This city will always pursue you. You’ll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses. You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there’s no ship for you, there’s no road. Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Noah Vaughn
Bio: Noah Vaughn received a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993. He has been photographing rooms and buildings around Chicagoland since 2007. 

Statement: These photos are from an ongoing series documenting institutional spaces, primarily schools and churches. I am interested in rooms where the function of the space is not so obvious, leaving the image open to interpretation and narrative possibilities.

Matilde Viegas
Bio: Matilde Viegas is a photographic artist based in Portugal, member of Women Photograph. During her science studies, she began photographing with an analog camera. Working with portraiture and documentary, Matilde’s work stems from her personal experience, documenting issues surrounding family, personal history, and identity with an empathic and observant approach. 

Statement: The privacy of our homes works as a shelter — a place where one can fully be oneself. Currently, the visual narratives depicting queer identities in general media oscillate between fetishism, objectification, or the perpetuation of traumas inflicted by centuries of oppression. With the project Love Stories, I am changing the visual discourse of queer lives, depicting it from an empathetic point of view, anchored in the privacy of their homes.

Lenny Waasdorp
Bio: Lenny Waasdorp studied fine art at the Royal Academy (The Hague), the Marmara University in Istanbul and postgraduate DNA in The Hague, but as a photographer she’s self-taught. Waasdorp investigates, while photographing, the photography as a medium. This results in self-portraits, portraits of others, pinhole photos, mobile photography and digital collages. Analog and digital. 

Statement: During the whole Covid period I swim, several times a week, with beautiful people in a beautiful place. I am happy to introduce you to: My Tribe.

Susan Marie White
Bio: Susan Marie White is an artist and mother. Raised by a florist and an engineer in Connecticut, she spent her academic years studying mathematics, immersed in patterns and the abstract world. After a career in technology, she shifted focus to more creative pursuits. Her primary mediums are lens-based and organic materials (namely, hair). Her work investigates personal narratives surrounding family, identity, memory, and loss. Susan lives and works from her home studio in Pleasantville, NY. 

Statement: Found in the immigration records of my late Polish grandmother was the oldest photograph of her, obscured to black, her hair deeply familiar. Since seeing this picture, I’ve come to study my children relentlessly. These thread-like locks emerge from their scalps, captivating me. For my series Strands, I bedim their faces on scanned polaroids with ashes burned from clippings of their hair. I repeatedly photocopy their images, almost indistinguishable from each other. What persists?

Magdalena Wutkowska
Bio: Magdalena Wutkowska lived in Poland, Norway, England and Svalbard, and currently in the Czech Republic. She is a microbiologist by profession. In her photography practice she attempts to visually describe her personal perspective on people’s relationship with their surroundings and processes associated with it, such as emotions, alteration, choice, chaos and displacement. Although self-taught, she experiments with a variation of different photographic materials and techniques. 

Statement: Man-altered landscapes are seen all around the world and expanding also in places where human population is scarce or scattered. The Arctic, perceived as pristine and untouched, experience human influence of diverse nature and magnitude, despite the fact that it is scarcely populated. Even if we were removed from the Arctic immediately, our actions would continue to warm up, melt and further change the north.

Michael Young
Bio: Michael Young is a lens-based artist whose work has been shown in group shows in Paris, Sydney, Fotofestival Lenzburg (Switzerland), New York, and across the US. This year Young was named a Top 50 artist in Photolucida’s Critical Mass as well as a finalist for Klompching Gallery’s 2021 Fresh exhibition. Work from his current series Hidden Glances has been published in Der Greif issue #14 YES TO ALL, guest edited by Sylvie Fleury. He will also be featured in the upcoming issue of Divide magazine. Young’s work has been featured recently online on Pineapple Zine and Balaclava.Q websites, as well as Instagram stories/posts on Flak Photo, Humble Arts Foundation, and the J. Paul Getty Museum’s blog. Young has a BA in Spanish Language & Literature from Yale University, and an MA in education from NYU. 

Statement: "Hidden Glances" is a series of photographs made from vintage gay pornography calendars published during my childhood until I came out. Images are hand cut, layered, and then photographed. By eliminating the presence of skin from the top layer, one month’s muscular silhouette becomes a window that reveals and conceals parts of another month’s figure. The use of calendars is strategic; they chronicle the years when I believed that being straight was right. The images are a visual compression of those years when I longed to look at men but feared that my gaze would linger and my homosexuality exposed.