Innholdsfortegnelse for #6 2020 i Artdoc Photography Magazine

“Documentary photographers are the conscience of society.– The Artdoc Team Dear Reader, Photography is increasingly seen as a form of visual storytelling, whether it is the photographer’s personal story, told in metaphors and symbols, or a story about the social and political world told through the lives of people in the remotest corners of the world. This issue of Artdoc brings famous, seasoned and award-winning storytellers who all made documentary stories about our dire world. American photographer Bryan Schutmaat made large-format analogue pictures of the desolate mining regions in the USA. He combined barren landscapes with desolate interiors and portraits of lonely residents. He deems his work political but does not see himself as an activist. One of the most talked-about photographers of our time, Alec Soth, uses his 8x10…

What was the influence of the New Topographics, the photographers who redefined the concept of landscape photography in the 70s, on Alec Soth? “Joel Sternfield taught photography when I was at the photo academy, but unfortunately I couldn’t get into his classes. In the library they had Uncommon Places by Stephen Shore, which greatly influenced me. I mainly responded to the New Topographics in a nonintellectual, emotional way. I was mainly influenced by the poetry of the image and also the technique. Before I started Sleeping by the Mississippi, I looked at all my favorite photographers, such as Stephen Shore, Nicholas Nixon and even Sally Man. And they all used 8x10 inches and I thought: ‘I love all these photographers. I have to try that too.’ And so, I ended…

Martin Thaulow created the photo series Home is where the heart is for the IDE, Identity Dialogues Europe, A Creative Europe project, where he has been one of Copenhagen Photo Festival’s artists in residence since 2019. The photographers in the project were asked to document Europe and evolving identity. Martin explains this via Skype from his home on the Danish island Bornholm: “I heard the proverb from a Croatian refugee in Germany, where he was expelled. I asked him where he lived, and he answered: ‘Home is where the heart is.’ It made sense to use this as the title for my project.” The first diptych of the project is quite dramatic. On the left, you see a typical home in the evening of a nondescript neighbourhood in Denmark and…

I Know How Furiously Your Heart is Beating Alec Soth Taking its name from a line in the Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Gray Room,” Alec Soth’s latest book is a lyrical exploration of the limitations of photographic representation. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren’t about any particular place or population. By a process of intimate and often extended engagement, Soth’s portraits and images of his subject’s surroundings involve an enquiry into the extent to which a photographic likeness can depict more than the outer surface of an individual, and perhaps even plumb the depths of something unknowable about both the sitter and the photographer. Grays the Mountain Sends Bryan Schutmaat Equipped with a large format view camera, and inspired by the poetry of…

"Each image is made from two found 35mm film slides. I remove the slides from the mounts and trawl my slide collection for two images that reveal new narratives. If a pair has a kind of rhyme to them, I remount them, and I project them onto a screen and look at them in detail. When this close inspection would show that there is no ‘story’, I would start again. I work in this manner until I successfully create a composite that offers a new narrative, one that visually provokes a scene or place that feels familiar and yet is impossible. It can take a long time before I make one that reveals an ‘other’. The two slides – witnesses of their own unique time and place – make a…

“This series is a visual diary of living through a pandemic in Monte Alto from a Korean perspective. The photographs were captured during the first phase of the confinement in Spain that began on March 14, 2020, during the short outings with my pet. During the lockdown, all the things started to connect and telling me a thing or two. As I walked outside, the streets began talking to me. All I had to do was listen to what they had to say and make a record of it, one click at a time. I made prints on a traditional Chinese calligraphy paper, using cyanotype and colouring it with natural dyes. Each copy weighs 30 grams only. I wanted to make them light and delicate, as if images could fall,…

The Swiss photographer Yann Mingard worked for four years on his book Deposit, from 2009 to 2013, during which time he captured numerous locations in Europe where various forms of our legacy are preserved. Mingard, who was trained as a botanist, first discovered his fascination for our drive to protect our earthly heritage at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a large storage facility for plant seeds in Spitsbergen. He made a series of photos of this icy place for Le Monde. Hereafter he decided to continue. After first conducting a comprehensive study of how seeds, DNA, stem cells, molars, sperm and computer data are stored, he divided his project into four parts: plants, animals, people and data. “I have tried to photograph the most archetypal repositories of each category in…