My ‘Suburbs at Night’ series focus’ on the everyday surroundings that people now find themselves living in. I describe my work as landscape photography, but while landscape photography is typically about capturing a scenic place in its best light, I try to capture a place ‘as is’. And while landscape photography is normally made up of trees and mountains, I use the motifs of urban landscape, buildings and powerlines.
People have described my work as dark and menacing, with a foreboding quality, but I think this is more to do with the viewer’s own perceptions, formed by influences like human nature, upbringing and a paranoid media; which push the idea that bad things happen at night. For me, these are places that have a certain magic to them, rather than menace.
While the urban landscape is full of activity by day with people and cars, my photos are absent of these so as not to distract the viewer. There is a distinct absence of people because human nature first draws our attention to figures, and away from the landscape. The focus of my photography isn’t on people but on place, on the landscape itself.
Using still photography, assemblage, and moving image, Aidan McNeill explores how the photographic image is utilized to create and project our collective experiences in a period of technological dominance. The theme of surface distance, geographically and metaphorically, is the thread running throughout her practice.
Referencing both the Romantic tradition and the romance of the theatre, CAST (2011), explores spectacle and artifice within photographic imagery. Taken during a West End musical, this work captures the smoke and lighting effects on the foreground of the Adelphi Theatre stage. The photographs seem to document an ethereal world of shadow and light, with an underlying geometric mapping plane. Closer inspection reveals prop tape, scratches and lines of trap doors highlighting the overall mechanics of the whole within this systematic collaboration of production.
Aidan McNeill was born in Toronto, Canada and she currently lives and works in London. She received her MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2006. She is represented by PayneShurvell (London).
My experiences lately have been ambiguous of time. I been living in the present dealing with each day on it’s own. Each moment taken on it’s own, and in it’s own time.
Empty landscapes waiting to happen are suggestions of an end with no suggestion of time. When I first began this project I stepped out into these empty landscapes I saw the absolute truth of the world, and that it was dark and relentless. Despite how it happens the universe will swallow us whole.
This project began to change from a depiction of a world coming to an end into struggling to find signs of rebirth, and I think it is necessary to show this progression.
Bio:
Hannah Hayes (b. 1990) spent the first eighteen years of her life living in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Her close relationship to the natural world is demonstrated throughout her photographic and mixed-media work. In 2010 she spent the summer living in Dubrovnik, Croatia and traveled through Eastern Europe. Traveling vs. the permanence of home, and freedom vs. stability are common issues in her work.
Hayes is currently living in Rochester, New York attending the Rochester Institute of Technology to achieve a undergraduate BFA in Professional Photographic Illustration with minor in Print Media.
Under the northern freeway : About the series
A1-A86 : The northern freeway. This vital artery is all too well known to Parisians and commuters. It winds through the capital’s northern suburbs, and always struck me as a symbolic frontier between what’s close and what’s remote from the center. Reaching the northern freeway’s underpass has been a daily rite for years : I would cross it to my teaching job in the banlieue and cross it again on my way back home. See this small series both as a remembrance and an homage to its beautiful, cathedral-like proportions…
Philippe Yong
Born in France in 1973. I hold an MA in French litterature and have been teaching it since, as well as history of art, in Paris’s northern and eastern “banlieues”.
Photographically wise, I’m self taught. I shoot film in medium format and mainly focus on the transformations of the urban world, with a keen interest in surburban spaces, industrial patrimony, requalification plans and their impact on a neighborhood’s visual identity, encounters between natural and manufactured elements… more of which can be found on this site
Chris Round is a Sydney based photographer. He uses both film and digital formats to create memorable depictions of the everyday world. From naturalistic images of industrial and ‘human-influenced’ landscapes to evocative representations of the Australian landscape, Chris connects with every scene to produce photographs that convey both a sense of place and time.
Chris has also worked in advertising and his work has won numerous international creative awards including a coveted Grand Prix at Cannes.
Chris Round is a Sydney based photographer. He uses both film and digital formats to create memorable depictions of the everyday world. From naturalistic images of industrial and ‘human-influenced’ landscapes to evocative representations of the Australian landscape, Chris connects with every scene to produce photographs that convey both a sense of place and time.
Chris has also worked in advertising and his work has won numerous international creative awards including a coveted Grand Prix at Cannes.
There’s a sly irony running through ‘Hating the Americans’, a presumption from viewer to viewer that we know what it is we are seeing and therefore that we also have a tacit agreement on its intention. A photographer friend of mine uses the metaphor of the conjurer to describe what the photographer does, photography as an illusion, a sleight of hand, maybe how we remember history or aesthetics is like that too. A double bind capturing between the viewer and viewed, between the pleasure of looking and the fear of constant surveillance, interchanging saturation and insufficiency at will.
The irony seems sly because of this illusion, the illusion that history is something that is being done to us I mean, a passive irony. Then, what seems like a position of disenchantment, might simply be a re-evaluation of the past, the hatred somebody else’s, the America, seen from a myriad different perspectives. What feels like an uncritical resemblance of modernity could as easily be read as a snapshot of the procedures toward its dismantling, modernity stuck on its own wheel. Tying to interchange the surfaces of past and present, active and passive, these photographs were simply meant to highlight this double bind, about what it is we perform when we deliver this conjuring trick of hating from a distance.
Karl Hurst is a photographer and poet working in Sheffield UK
One of the artists from “Azzoro Group” once said that everything has been done. The work of Rafał Karcz proves different. He showed us that Polish contemporary art is not only created by well-known artists like Magdalena Abakanowicz, Roman Opałka or Tadeusz Kantor, it is also made by talented, unknown people who are ready to be discovered.
His art is quite different from what we can see today: rough brush strokes, form full of expression. We can almost feel the influence of Warhol’s pop – art and the romantic watercolors painted by Turner. Karcz represents a brand new approach to classical techniques: watercolors, acryl, dark ink and soft lines of graphite. Although for many years the artist admired work of great painters from the past, in a way he managed to escape from the academic conventions. What is more, he used classical techniques and his knowledge to create an original style of his own. Though his artworks might seem realistic, on the second glimpse we can see that they can be classified, with equal ease, as avant-garde abstractions: visions painted on the old films, drowned in a fabulous spectacle of color. The association with photography emerges almost immediately.
Nevertheless, Rafał Karcz does not paint freeze – frames taken from the city life. The artist, entrenched in post modernistic way of thinking, decided to face the very difficult task of painting a concept – condition of the contemporary human being. The characters on his canvas are, as in life, blended into the cultural background. They are also very diverse, often lost, and constantly seeking inspiration.
Karcz through the art shows his point of view. His artworks reflect not only the Polish presence with its baggage of historical references, but also ask questions about the mentality of the contemporary human being and the condition of his emotions. Those interesting paintings encourage us to stop and think for a second. They are the same as the figure of their creator: original and different from well-known stereotypes.
The forty-two-year-old artist with a diploma in art history and industrial design is definitely standing out from the crowd. Even though he is living and working in a small village in Poland called Bronowice, he does not consider himself as an outcast from the modern world. On the contrary, he is an extraordinary artist of the XXI century, with an interesting image and fresh ideas. While remaining in constant fight with the overwhelming mainstream, he chose to publish his artworks on various international websites connected to art and culture. Currently, he is creating a private collection of unusual paintings coming from the exchange with foreign artists who are quite similar to him – talented, still searching for their place on the demanding art market.
Paul Kwiatkowski is a writer and photographer living in New York City. He is currently finishing his first photo essay and novel ‘And Every Day Was Overcast’, which is about growing up in the 90s amongst the swamps and strip malls of South Florida. During the summer Paul traveled to Haiti for two weeks. He went to explore the country and to document a rarely seen Vodou pilgrimage.