N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A,
a blog about photography by Sofia Silva
caption (image above): © Riccardo Angei, from Glue and Souls. I’d like to state, with a certain amount of certainty, that the only thing that sets men and women apart is that we’ll never be able to explain to men what it feels like to be a woman in a men’s world. They know, they empathize,…
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Somehow Max Pinckers‘ work has never excited me much. I though it was too neat, too contrived, too pretty, too arranged, too controlled… After coming across a feature of Magnum Photos Now about Finding Your Documentary Photography Style and reading the words he chose to describe his approach to documentary photography, I went back to some…
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Some people have a hard time accepting that photography can also be a therapeutic tool, given the right context. To a certain point, it’s understandable: photography is so many different things, that at some point we all struggle with its identity. I never doubted photography could do great things: not only could it testify and…
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Street Level Photoworks‘ upcoming exhibition is called Common Ground: New Documentary Photography from Scotland & Wales and is promoted as a show that brings together “diverse themes and ideas associated with distinctive national and cultural visual inspiration, this collective exhibition welds them together into a cohesive narrative, at times overlapping and continuously referencing and complementing…
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What follows is a selection of photographs from this year shortlisted photographers for one of the most coherent photo-festivals in Europe: Hyères. As is made very clear by the following selection, this prize is also an elegy to the long lasting love affair between photography ans sculpture, with a particular emphasis on the fusion between…
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movie poster Spike Jonze’s new movie “Her” is a must see! First and foremost because it is an original script, both in the sense that it is new and also in the sense that it is unique, thought-provoking. Because the work is Spike’s own vision of the sort of relationships human will develop with machines…
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© Melissa Zexter, Brooklyn Bus Map, from Maps and Memories. Gelatin Silver Print + thread. © Melissa Zexter, Color Eye Chart, from Maps and Memories. Gelatin Silver Print + thread. © Melissa Zexter, Cardinal, from Embroidered Portraits. Gelatin Silver Print + thread. © Melissa Zexter, Leopard, from Embroidered Portraits. Gelatin Silver Print + thread. ©…
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© Gil Pasternak, Esther Pasternak, 1970s. Esther Pasternak collection of family photographs, 1946–99. Description: The defiant lion is a tombstone monument erected in 1932 to commemorate a group of eight Jewish pioneer settlers who, as the Israeli version of the story goes, fell to Arab village militias in the settlement of Tel Hai in 1920…
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Le Fabuleux album d’Amélie Poulain […] The photo-finders will refer to themselves as artists or curators, editors or collectors—often, as an unclassifiable mixture. Depending on their self-described status, the archives of found, anonymous photographs they produce will be labeled works of art, exhibitions, projects, or studies—or something in between. Departing from an understanding of the…
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© Yaakov Israel, all photographs from the series The quest for the man on the white donkey, 2011 “As referred by the Jewish tradition the Messiah (the Prophet) will arrive riding on a white donkey. Few years ago, as I was taking photographs near the Dead Sea a Palestinian man rode past me on his…
Read More© Alma Haser, all from the series Cosmic Surgery “Alma has always made things with her hands and now tries to find ways to combine her fine art background with photography. She has used origami in the past as props in her photographs, but in this series ‘Cosmic Surgery’ the origami has become an integral…
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© Eiffel Chong, Untitled, from the series Royal Malaysia Police “I came across an abandoned police station and found identity photographs of the police personnel being scattered around. Most of them still look good, except for a layer of dust on top of the photographs. However, there were some that have been destroyed by the…
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“The theme of dehumanization was the subject matter of many works in a variety of media. None was clearer or more appropriate to the exhibition than Portrait, a video tape by Harmut Lerch and Claus Holtz which consists of 100,000 photographic portraits viewed consecutively at a gradually increasing rate, up to 20,000 faces per second.…
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© Sara Rahbar, Untitled, from the series Love arrived & How red, photography, 2008 © Sara Rahbar, Trapped in Dark Night with Nowhere to Run, I Have Died a Million Times Every Night in this Bed (left) + Kurdistan Flag #5 (right), from the series Flags, mixed media + textiles, 2005-2010 © Sara Rahbar, Solitary…
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© Ian van Coller, Daisy Angy Kekae (left), from the series Collage Portraits, 2009 “This series combines several influences that have personally been relevant to my art-making process. The work grew out of my experimentation with the use of quilting techniques based on traditions from Africa and Gees Bend, Alabama as a way to tell…
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© Hannah Villiger, Untitled, 1980 – C-print from Polaroid © Hannah Villiger, Sculptural, 1993 © Hannah Villiger, Untitled, 1980/81 – 12 C-prints of polaroids “When trying to describe physical feelings of any kind, we find ourselves shortchanged by language. I arrived at this conclusion after several, always hopelessly crude attempts to describe fundamental moments in…
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© Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Life Mixing, 1975 © Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Untitled, 1980 – a clear glass jar with lid containing 5 pieces of paper with type-written text and black string. © Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, from It’s Almost That, 1977 © Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Exilee, 1980 “From the mid-1970s until her…
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© Robert Seydel, all Untitled, from Book of Ruth, collages, c. 2000-09 Robert Seydel’s “Book of Ruth is an alchemical assemblage that composes the life of his alter ego, Ruth Greisman—spinster, Sunday painter, and friend to Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp. Through collages, drawings, and journal entries from Ruth’s imagined life, Seydel invokes her interior…
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© Scott Alario, all Untitled, from the project Our Fable “I’m in the process of building a folk tale for my daughter. It is a paternal inevitability to make up stories for one’s children, and for me, doing so has recently become the passion in my creative practice. There are two photographs I remember from…
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© Diogo Simões, Untitled, from the series Miratejo © Diogo Simões, Untitled, from the series Miratejo © Diogo Simões, Untitled, from the series Miratejo Influenced by current-events (this is a circumstantial analogy) Diogo’s (b.1988, Miratejo, PT) photographs remind me of a kind of portrait of youth that makes me think of Gus van Sant’s universe.…
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N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 