Innholdsfortegnelse for #4 2022 i Artdoc Photography Magazine

JUSTIN KIMBALL The cryptic title, Who By Fire, comes from a Byzantine liturgical poem about the day of judgement and the possibility of redemption. “It is about who's making the decisions and what the forces around us are, and at what point do we turn ourselves over to these kinds of external powers? The idea behind the title is that life can be outside our control and how we respond to that.” The images in Who By Fire reveal an inherent sadness, decline, and poverty in the United States. There are images of neglected houses and poorly dressed people, who all seem utterly introverted and intensely lonely. “I tried to capture the idea that in our current cultural and political moment many of us appear isolated, whether by ourselves or…

When something turns your life upside down, keeping the show on the road is hard. My life became chaotic when one of my twin daughters developed epilepsy out of the blue. Phone calls from strangers who had picked her up, or from her sister or a hospital and I would have to drop everything, leave work to go to wherever she had been found. She would be confused, disorientated, and sometimes hurt physically. I was to come to know ‘fear’ in a way that I had not known before. Fear that she would have a fit in the night and not be there in the morning. My senses became hugely amplified. I was attuned to the smallest detail in my world, the softest sound or change in temperature. To live…

The Sweating Subject is a series of group portraits of tribal chiefs and their retinues, which include myself, photographer Jan Banning as the sweating subject himself. All are members of either the Gonja or the Dagomba tribe in the Northern Territories of Ghana — except for me: I am from the Netherlands, and I was in Ghana to photograph the blend of tradition and modernity found there, when he was invited by the chiefs to have my photo taken with them. Much has been said about the power of the photographer who, for journalistic or other reasons, travels the world to record ‘the other. But in these photographs, although the camera position, lighting and other aesthetic and technical details were decided by me, the photographer is just as much an…

In 2015, I became a mother. I was prepared for the gruelling labour and sleepless nights, but the loss of my sense of self came as a surprise. I had no time to think, and I began to feel like a shell of a person. My early days of motherhood were alienating and awful, as well as sentimental and dear. I began to see myself as defined only by a relationship. I felt that my son was an appendage of myself, the embodiment of self and other. It was hard to accept that he was a growing, a changing person while I was to remain forever split. When he is near, my thoughts are entangled around him, and when I am away, I cannot seem to be the person I…

How does one move through life with the scars of the past? When I was ten, my mother died unexpectedly from a heart attack. I couldn't understand where she went or when she would return. Just as I began to comprehend this loss, my father died. I was without support from my family and community. I was lost. My series Without a Map re-imagines this period deeply rooted in my memories. Visiting my childhood home, synagogue and family plot provided an entry into my personal retelling. Working with family photos, creating new images from my past and turning the camera on myself, I found the means to evoke, reinterpret and address unanswered questions born from early imprints buried long ago. www.guggenheimphotography.com…

This is my Country is a documentary photo project in which Sjaak Verboom explores the themes of identity and belonging. Every photograph portrays two women, one of Dutch descent and the other of immigrant descent, surrounded by a typically Dutch landscape. Both women have a Dutch passport and are dressed in their own traditional clothing. Clothing does not only cover our nakedness but also reveals our identity. The women express their identity, heritage, and belonging through clothing. By posing alongside someone with a different dress, they break out of the exclusiveness of their group identity. We all are, as we stand next to each other, human. Our clothing shows where we come from, but our pose highlights something much more important: we are human. Wife. Mother. We are Dutch. The…

Indigenous people are usually a topic of discussion, but rarely do they have a hand in shaping it. I started the first photographs of this series in 2015 and returned years later to continue with the same tribe. Initially, there was mainly an aesthetic interest – the Arbore are people of a balanced beauty – and their way of life began to attract my attention. Some conversations turned curiosity into a cultural interest and, after some research, into a desire to share what I have seen and, even more, what I would like to see there in the future. I travel around the world, often as a witness of seemingly diametrically opposed realities to everyday western life. I wanted to contextualize the images or put it another way: imagery does…

MAXIME TAILLEZ Maxime Taillez grew up in northern France close to the Belgian border, where he was used to regularly crossing the invisible border. During his study of photography, he started to explore the French-Belgian frontier as a small project. He was curious to see what happened to the border stations. After he finished his academy, he decided to go for a much broader project: to document the border with France and all its neighbouring countries. During his research, he discovered the origin of many boundaries. “At first, I thought borders were creations of human beings, but then I discovered the border with Germany was mainly the river Rhine and that the border between France and Spain was geologically formed by the high mountains of the Pyrenees. It is a…

MARION GRONIER Marion Gronier started her six-year project, We were never meant to survive in 2013 by photographing Mennonites in Pennsylvania, a group of strictly religious Anabaptist Christian people from East Europe who migrated in the 17th century to North America. She first saw a choir of Mennonites in 2009, singing a Capella in the New York subway. “The contrast between their immaculate whiteness and the dark and dirty passageways was striking. I scrutinized each face one by one. Their strangeness troubled me, almost disturbed me. I thought they were an incarnation of the white American's ideal of purity, like the legendary Pilgrim Fathers, God's missionary. Then I got the idea of juxtaposing them with Native American faces and telling the story of the encounter between the two peoples who…