Innholdsfortegnelse for #6 2021 i Artdoc Photography Magazine

“Female photographers have a great capacity for empathy with which they metaphorically portray the world of emotions and personal experiences.– The Artdoc Team In this last issue of the year, Artdoc Photography Magazine presents the vision of female photographers. Men like to depict women as objects of beauty, but Rania Matar sees women differently. She looks for the strength of young women, especially women from Lebanon, who have a lot to endure. Cecilia Reynoso examines the dynamics of large families. She photographed the many dinners and gatherings of her extended family-in-law in her ongoing series The Flowers Family. Katja Liebmann, who grew up in former East Berlin, makes large cyanotype prints of her memories of the city trips she made after the fall of the Wall. The ragged images emphasise…

A return to Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida This is the preface of the book What Photography is by James Elkins. I think that three interests drive the great majority of current writing. First is contemporary fine art photography as practiced by the internationally prominent figural photographers such as Jeff Wall, Beat Streuli, Thomas Struth, Rineke Dijkstra, Thomas Ruff, and Andreas Gursky. That literature includes texts by Wall, Michael Fried, Diarmuid Costello, and numbers of newspaper critics and commissioned writers. What matters for it is modernism, postmodernism, the gallery system, the art market, and the status of photography as fine art. Second is photography’s social significance, a subject that has attracted a host of writers including contributors to The Meaning of Photography (2008) and Photography Degree Zero (2009), Margaret Olin, Georges…

Highlights of Artdoc Exhibition…

One of the principal subjects of Rania Matar is identity, as well as a woman and as an immigrant in the USA. Was it hard for her to adjust to life in the United States? “I went to Cornell University in upstate New York to continue my architecture studies that I had started at the American University of Beirut. I was in the studio all the time, which was basically the same as in Lebanon. Beirut is a very cosmopolitan city so travelling to a new country wasn’t too intimidating for me. My biggest shock was the weather. I grew up in beautiful Mediterranean weather, and here I was in upstate New York in the cold and the snow. I eventually got used to it and saw how beautiful it…

“Since childhood, I have heard the phrase “you’re a girl!”. As I got older, the phrase began to sound differently “you are not feminine.” As I grew older, my opinion about what is femininity changed. At first, it seemed that to be feminine, you have to put on a lot of makeup on your face, wear dresses, walk with your hair down. Then this opinion was transformed into the fact that the girl who gave birth to the child is feminine. I grew up in a patriarchal family, where specific requirements were imposed on a girl-woman: to run a household, to be beautiful, to inspire, to be obedient, not to contradict my father or husband, not to load with bad mood and problems, hide my emotions, get married, have children,…

The series Between two worlds explores themes of metamorphism, transformation, ascension. The works suggest a transformation from one state to another – a passing to another world. They draw on Greek mythological (half-human, half-bird) themes such as Siren (the divine voice) and Harpe (the wind spirit). The subjects are both powerful and peaceful, accepting of their impending passage. It is a part of an ongoing project looking at the boundaries of life and death, beauty and tragedy and passing to a new state. In our next lives, we’ll remember Not to be human. We will be a pair of wild geese flying high into the sky. And from that distance, we will look down on the world’s blinding snows, its oceans, waters, hills, clouds, and red dust, as if we…

“I work with photography as a physical, sensitive, malleable material. I use the old ways to take advantage of the magic of the chemical reaction. To be able to choose to control or, on the contrary, to let myself be carried away by the risks and surprises that these processes have in store for us. The chemical processes account in their own way for the reality offered to them. I practice different ancient processes that originated in photography. Wet collodion (1850), the old printing processes that I continue to explore: salted paper, albumen paper, cyanotype, platinum printing—photoengraving which still allows other renderings. I work with the 20x25 cm or 4x5 inch camera, most often on glass, metal or MMA plates. I have also worked on Polaroid and Polaroid emulsion transfer…

Sleeping Beauty Lydia Panas This volume presents award-winning Pennsylvania-based photographer Lydia Panas’ (born 1958) much-praised series of mesmerizing color portraits of reclining women and girls. In an interesting reversal of roles, the artist’s and models’ gazes are intertwined, incorporating the viewer as participant in an often uncomfortable connection. Critics and curators have praised the work for Panas’ artistic and technical mastery, and all have noted and examined the powerfully affecting gaze of her subjects. And Time Folds Vanessa Winship And Time Folds accompanies a retrospective exhibition of the British photographer Vanessa Winship at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. At once intimate and epic, Winship’s black-and-white photographs explore notions of borders, land, memory, desire and history. This volume comprises photographs from seven series, including projects made during a decade living in…

“In the series The role we played to disappear, I wanted to look at codependence. I know we are told it’s the worst thing we can do as a couple. For me, it has been the best way I have ever loved. So I’m playing into this disappearing into each other. Sometimes battering the prints because I think they look more beautiful, sometimes leaving them pure, I aim to take away space and time, echoing the centuries before us. About Working with photography Paula Rae Gibson is interested in how people feel, getting across universal emotions and basing beauty on feelings more than her subjects features. She is currently working with dancers from all over the world based in London. She works in analogue and digital. www.paularaegibson.com…