I’ve been enjoying the work of photographers and friends who embrace color darkroom printing as part of their art practice, including Rory Hamovit is a Los Angeles-based photographer who shoots large format color film in his studio in east LA. We first met while attending Bard College together – I still remember how much I loved his thesis show in 2013. I have been lucky to get to visit Rory’s ...

Lately, I’ve been especially drawn to photographers who incorporate color darkroom printing as an integral part of their practice. One artist whose work stands out is Adali Schell, a Los Angeles-based photographer, shoots color film – primarily 35mm, with some medium format – at home in LA and with his extended family in rural Ohio. His recent series, “Car Pictures”, explores how he and his ...

In 2023, I was an artist in residence at Quinn Emanuel Artists in Residence in downtown Los Angeles. I started a new body of work, “On Hills,” while based out of my studio at QE. This was my first new project since starting Borrowed Landscape during the COVID-19 pandemic. After a couple of years photographing so close to home – my garden, neighbors, and friends – starting this new project helped ...

Why a book? Why pages? Why paper? A plea for publishing as artistic practice In most cases, using the medium photography to tell a story means producing several pictures on a topic and then putting them in relation to each other. In order to communicate this story to an audience the artist can use a large variety of vehicles. Today the way we consume images is obviously dominated by online ...

Discussing the concept of truth in photography „Every photograph is a fiction with pretensions to truth“ - Joan Fontcuberta Since its invention in the 19th century the photographic process and the medium photography have always been understood as a machinery depicting an excerpt of reality. From a more clarified point of view this connection between photography and reality has always been ...

The Harvest addresses the financial industry and its rather abstract methods to generate profit. Although action of the financial industry seems decoupled from a classic and simple view on economy - producing and selling something which satisfies a demand, the industry's conduct has a huge impact on society and the international economic fabric. I worked on The Harvest in 2018/19, but the very ...

Introducing contemporary South Korean photography "Local Voices" is the digital media platform that narrates the creative horizon of image culture, country by country: showcasing the photographers, institutions, and independent players shaping the contemporary imagescape(s). Today, we will introduce South Korean artists and the contemporary photographic scene. This article is an exercise in ...

An emotional dialogue with A.I. The medium photography is broadly positioned, and many players out of a wide range of aspiration add content to a partly uniform mass of images. Now a new protagonist has entered the scene: Generative A.I., which is built around the interface between visuals and words. This is similar to a basic model for understanding we use when we look at a picture: trying to ...

Ping Pong, a longterm visual conversation Ping Pong is a visual conversation between Helsinki based Henrik Duncker and me, Munich based Jens Masmann. We started our nonverbal communication after we noted links and similarities in our work when meeting in Derby 2017 at Format Festival. Reading each other’s work and learning to understand its visual vocabulary was the main framework of this ...

Der Greif in partnership with MPB presents Kıvılcım S. Güngörün, Guest Room Scholarship winner Der Greif and MPB introduce Kıvılcım S. Güngörün, scholarship recipient from our Guest Room “Urban Exoticism", curated by Michael Grieve and Ruth Blees Luxemburg. Güngörün is a Turkish photographer whose work masterfully merges the realms of personal memory and urban narrative. An image from her ...

An exploratory meditation on the concept of intimacy in a personal and intuitive way. In this uncanny parallel universe of disastrous mating and traumatic unions, the characters’ attempts at closeness only enhance their sense of isolation. With the urge to abide by the myth of becoming “one,” the emotional and physical weight of closeness becomes cumbersome and bulky. The burden of childhood ...

I’ve often described myself as an introvert. Getting lost in my own mind is often a source of comfort and a place to recharge. In some sense, it feels like I’m also doing that creatively with my practice right now - I’m introverting, looking within. Reassembling my thoughts, and feelings, and how I express them through photography. I don't know how or what my practice will look like at the end of ...

Those who know me well would describe me as playful, yet this side of me has rarely found space in my work. Enrolling in the Master in Photography at ECAL, I knew I wanted to push my practice further - to break away from the constraints of continuity, from the self-imposed expectation that my work must always fit within a specific framework. I wanted to make space for something completely ...

PhotoVogue Festival ninth edition forms a love letter to nature The PhotoVogue Festival, the pioneering fashion photography festival that unites ethics and aesthetics, returns to Milan for its ninth edition. Taking place from March 6 to 9, 2025, at BASE Milano, this year's festival is centered around the theme “The Tree of Life: A Love Letter to Nature.” This thought-provoking theme highlights ...

After graduating, I found myself in a creative limbo. I continued working on my diploma project, which evolved into Somewhere Less Than Heaven, and I sought new ways to push my work forward. Enrolling in PH Museum’s Folio Masterclass in 2022 expanded my perspective on photography, especially in the context of the photobook. Yet, despite the structure and community, I hit a wall - a period of ...

I have always been drawn to images - glued to television screens as a child, lost in the cinematic, the painted, the pixelated. But photography didn’t call to me until much later. Before 2018, it was just a tool - an extension of memory, a way to document rather than create. When I finally picked up the camera with intention, it became something else: a conversation between thought and instinct, ...

Where do our memories go when we are not remembering them? Do they linger somewhere, just beneath the surface, waiting for the next thing to stir them back to life? Or do they dissolve entirely, falling away until something - some scent, some sound, the way light hits a certain street corner - pulls them back into form? I have often imagined memory as a place, an inner landscape shaped by the ...

The world has recently lost a valuable person. David Lynch has left a deep impression on my visual development. I remember the first film I saw by him was “Eraserhead”, I was quite young and I couldn't understand how this oppressive feeling is such a brilliant way to evoke emotions. But now I understand and appreciate it. I have a series or rather a set of images that are not connected in any ...

The cuckoo migrating bird lays its eggs in other birds' nests, so its little nestlings are raised by unknown parents. During our lives, there are several opportunities to choose a family in the form of different communities that shape our identity as a second family. We cannot choose our relatives, but blood relation is an invisible link between us. We are closer to each other, we maintain ...

Negatives and traces of familiars inform Stella McGarvey’s “Lacunary” We periodically invite our alumni – artists we have featured in the past – to share their latest work and projects with us. Stella McGarvey, a South London-based artist, works across photography, sculpture, and paper. Driven by a deep desire for connection, she infuses objects with an anthropomorphic presence, viewing them as ...

When I planned the exhibition of KOMPLEMENT, I sought to create an installation that thematically strengthens the series and helps to understand it. I also considered it important to realize a visual experience that can be enjoyed through personal presence. I created a wooden structure made of slats, which allows for a view in the middle of the space, between the two walls, thus covering up ...

“As an age of all-pervasive image making, we still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them.” - W. J. T. Mitchell: Picture Theory We try to find the milestones of truth in the set of countless images, but we use the senses of past ...

Stand with your legs apart. Bend forward. Look back between your legs. Thank you. Now look around and take stock of what you see. The world has been stood on its head. (István Örkény: “The grotesque (a practical approach)”; translated by Judith Sollosy) In my work, I create fictitious constructions and compositions that deceive the eyes and invite the viewer to decipher them. Here, the ...