Chronicler, visual poet, anthropologist, sociologist, alchemist and conceptual artist: Stephen Gill is a unique maker of images who is constantly putting the photographic medium to the test and is able to create a visual language where documentary photography, coincidence, experiment and interventions are closely linked.

After devoting himself to documentary studies of Hackney’s urban landscape for years, Gill’s approach changed when he realised the limitations of this method of working. He has made various efforts to escape the technical restrictions of photography. The 2001 Hackney Wick series meant a new and liberating way of working. The images in Hackney Wick were made with a plastic camera that Gill had bought at a jumble sale. Because of the plastic lens and lack of control over shutter speed and focus, Gill felt that these photos, with their blurriness and limited clarity, came much closer to capturing the essence of the place.

With the realisation that documentary photography was often incapable of expressing concepts that were far more than purely descriptive, Gill began to make more and more use of the weaknesses of the medium. He took advantage of coincidence and employed manual interventions to help him to reveal what was most essential in his subjects. Among his working methods were burying photos (Buried), creating lavish collages with flowers and seeds (Hackney Flowers) and placing objects in the camera so that they left their traces on the film, causing confusion about the scale of the images (Talking to Ants).

Gill’s most recent series Best Before End was created with the aid of energy drinks which resulted in fantastical, abstract and vividly coloured works that through their intensity reflect contemporary, hectic urban life. First, he placed objects in the camera before taking the photographs, as he had done in the previous series. The negatives were later immersed in the energy drinks, which made the images shift their positions, disruptions to appear and softened the film emulsion. This made it possible to manipulate the emulsion – to stretch it, move it, tear it and to separate the various layers of the film, which were then reworked with a soft brush.

In addition to the photo series, each of which shows another of Gill’s subjects or concerns, the exhibition includes an overview of his publications. Gill is internationally esteemed as a significant maker of photo books, because of the special and tactile quality of the publications produced by Nobody, his own publishing house. Gill considers these publications to be the final stage of his photo series.

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On March 12, 2013, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs (Switzerland, 1979) were chosen as the winners of the Foam Paul Huf Award 2013 by an international jury. This annual prize given to a photography talent under 35 years consists of € 20.000 and a project with Foam.

The jury gathered in anticipation and was deeply impressed by the diversity and seriousness of the wide-ranging nominations from across the international photographic spectrum. The jury stated: “Our shortlist consisted of a select group representing a variety of approaches, from contemporary docu-graphic to conceptual and fine-art practices. In the work of artistic collaborators Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs we see a playfulness and depth that touches upon the very DNA of photography. We happily confer this prize on them unanimously.”

Darius Himes, chairman of the jury noted:
“As illusionists intent on pushing against the boundaries of the medium, Onorato and Krebs skillfully engage their audiences and convey some of the magic that lies at the core of photographic image-making.”

Director of Foam, Marloes Krijnen, on the Foam Paul Huf Award: “I’m tremendously proud of the existence and continuity of the Foam Paul Huf Award. Every year we see a great amount of new and qualitatively excellent work. Next to the Foam Magazine Talent Issue and Unseen, the international photography fair which takes places in September on the Westergasfabriek terrain in Amsterdam, the award is very much in line with Foam’s objective to discover and support international, young photography talent.”

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Joel Sternfeld (born June 30, 1944) is a fine-art color photographer noted for his large-format documentary pictures of the United States and helping establish color photography as a respected artistic medium. He has many works in the permanent collections of the MOMA in New York City and the Getty Center in Los Angeles. He has influenced a generation of color photographers, including Andreas Gursky, who borrows many of Sternfeld’s techniques and approaches.

Sternfeld earned a BA from Dartmouth College and teaches photography at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He began taking color photographs in 1970 after learning the color theory of Johannes Itten and Josef Albers. Color is an important element of his photographs.

American Prospects (1987) is Sternfeld’s most known book and explores the irony of human-altered landscapes in the United States. To make the book, Sternfeld photographed ordinary things, including unsuccessful towns and barren-looking landscapes.
Another book, On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam (1997), is about violence in America. Sternfeld photographed sites of recent tragedies. Next to each photograph is text about the events that happened at that location.
From 1991 to 1994 Sternfeld worked with Melinda Hunt to document New York City’s public cemetery on Hart Island, resulting in the book “Hart Island” (1998).
Sternfeld has also published books about social class and stereotypes in America (Stranger Passing (2001)), an abandoned elevated railway in New York (Walking the High Line (2002)), and Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America (2006).
When It Changed (2007) contains close-up portraits of delegates debating global warming at an United Nations conference in Montreal.

All copyright Joel Sternfeld.

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Lambis Stratoudakis was born and raised in southern Crete, Greece. Later he studied Architecture in Germany before moving to Sweden.
Stratoudakis has worked as an architect, photographer, educator, and lecturer and gained national recognition for his underwater images of freedivers.
Everything begun in 2006 when he was asked to photograph freedivers in Egypt. Stratoudakis: “Nothing I have experienced in my life before that was more beautiful, graceful and peaceful. Those freedivers vanishing down, from the big blue to the black abyss. My love for the elegance, grace and esthetic movements of the human body was born and from that moment there was no way back.”

He started to evolve as a photographer trough visual concepts, poses and mainstream style fashion and beauty photography. “With growing experience I try to go beyond and let my daydreams, moods and obsessions drive me, especially in my private art projects,” says Stratoudakis

He continues: “I love to work under the surface, dive deeper and build a intimacy between me and the subject. I believe this is the only way to create and find all those qualities that we hide and when we, in the end, open up. We forget the camera and just see, feel and strip down to the bare essentials, this one and only moment. This is a very challenging and intimate approach but the only way I can work. I have never been rational. Always experimental and adaptive. I love to try new things, combining different techniques and finding new ways both analog, digital and always suited to the final image that I have in my mind. Many things have been said about my photos. Ethereal, erotic, mysterious, magical or simply beautiful but most I like that they have their own life and often are “unreal” to me to. As an epilogue I think, that most of all I need to keep doing what I love in a very intimate and humble way.”

About his series ‘Extracting Souls’ Statoudakis states:

Beauty and the color, especially the color red was and is something that has always attracted me.
The day I started to experiment with instant film was the day I discovered the aesthetics I had been searching for such a long time.
Red, warm and painted. It’s all about wishes, sacred glimpses and the magic I was seeking in those series.

Sculpting those polaroids that are so hard to control, pushing those soft emulations, those faded mute colors and try to reveal what lays behind it, not just colors and light but also feelings and memories, beauties and stories when they really do not exist, are the most rewarding and proud moments when I create them.

It’s like extracting souls and trapping them for eternity.

All copyright Lambis Statoudakis

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Eugenia Maximova was born in Ruse, Bulgaria. She graduated from The University of Vienna, reading journalism and communication science.

Eugenia Maximova first became interested in photography in 2005 after the sudden death of her mother, a recognized Bulgarian painter.
“Looking through the viewer and pressing the camera button helped me to escape the harrowing reality of her loss, to overcome the shock and lessen the burning pain. As time passed, photography became my favored means of communication; a new outlet of creative expression, for how I felt about both myself and my perception of the world around me.” says Eugenia.
Eugenia is now inseparable from her coeval Hasselblad 500 C, traveling together around the world in search of comprehension and visual truth.
In 2010 Eugenia participated in the SEE NEW PERSPECTIVES Masterclass organized and funded by World Press Photography and The Robert Bosh – Foundation. In 2011 Eugenia was selected and has successfully participated in the NOOR – NIKON Masterclass in Documentary Photography.

All copyright Eugenia Maximova.

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Cornell Capa (April 10, 1918 – May 23, 2008) was a Hungarian American photographer, member of Magnum Photos, and photo curator, and the younger brother of photo-journalist and war photographer Robert Capa.

Capa’s work is oftentimes considered quite eclectic, capturing moments as large of scale as wars to everyday subtle gestures of life, from the Six-Day War to children playing stick ball in the street. Capa wrote, “It took me some time to realize that the camera is a mere tool, capable of many uses, and at last I understood that, for me, its role, its power, and its duty are to comment, describe, provoke discussion, awaken conscience, evoke sympathy, spotlight human misery and joy which otherwise would pass unseen, un-understood and unnoticed. I have been interested in photographing the everyday life of my fellow humans and the commonplace spectacle of the world around me, and in trying to distill out of these their beauty and whatever is of permanent interest.”

In 1968 Capa published a book called The Concerned Photographer. As evidenced in his work, this title sums up his approach to photojournalism. Among the many events and causes Capa documented were the oppression of the Perón regime in Argentina and the subsequent revolution, Israel’s Six-Day War, the plight of the Russian Orthodox Church under Soviet rule, and the education of mentally retarded children. He also took great interest in politics and documented the presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy, along with Kennedy’s first one hundred days in office.

Capa wrote forewords to several collections of his brother’s photographs and was known to be protective of Robert Capa’s memory and reputation. For example, when Robert Capa’s famous image of a falling Spanish soldier during the Spanish Civil War was claimed to be a fake and not taken at the moment of death, Cornell Capa entered into a long battle to establish the legitimacy of the photograph, including tracking down the name of the soldier and his date of death.

All copyright the estate of Cornell Capa.

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Elle Perez is a photographer who works between the Bronx, New York, and Baltimore, Maryland. Perez’s work focuses on themes of gender-based identity, queer self-awareness and youth culture, and has most recently been exhibited at galleries such as Conner Contemporary Art (DC), Spattered Columns (NYC), and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

About her work she states:

I am fascinated by outsiders. More than simply a voyeuristic preoccupation, I identify with outsiders because I view myself as an outsider, too. Growing up Latina in the Bronx, there are no questions about gender roles. I learned them early on, watching telenovelas and Sábado Gigante (A variety show featuring Don Francisco, a stocky 70 year old host, and plenty of scantily clad dancing ladies) with my grandmother. My queerness was at odds with the images presented to me.

Photography has been my primary method of examining and exploring the dichotomy of my Catholic, Latino, upbringing and my identity as a queer artist. My camera is more than simply the device I use to create pictures; it allows me to connect to and document the people that I find inspiring, the communities that I move within, and to act as a participant-documentarian.

The collaborations that I have with others to create portraits are essential to my practice as an artist. I seek to document individual experiences. Although my work does not fit the mold of traditional self portraiture, I cannot help but think of it as such. I see myself in my subjects and become invested in their stories as if they were my own. From sweaty teenagers in church basements who have formed an extensive underground Black and Latino Punk Scene in the Bronx to Gender Outlaws across the United States, each project and portrait expresses a part of myself that I seek to explore.

All copyright Elle Perez.

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Not much information is available about Yosuke Bendai (1980) who was born in Shimane and lives and works in Tokyo.
We’ll let his pictures speak for themselves.

All copyright Yosuke Bendai.

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Alejandro Cartagena (1977) lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His projects employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban and environmental issues.

His work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of several museums including the sfmoma, the museum of contemporary photography in Chicago, the Portland Museum of Art, the Museo de arte modern in Rio, Brazil, the Fototeca de Nuevo leon, mexico and the fototeca nacional in Pachuca, Mexico.

He received the Photolucida Critical Mass Book Award, the Lente Latino Award in Chile, the Premio Salon de la fotografia from the fototeca de Nuevo leon and the Premio IILA-fotografia 2012 Award in Rome. He has been named a FOAM magazine TALENT and one of PDN 30 emerging photographers in 2010. He has also been a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Award and has been nominated for the Santa Fe Photography Prize, the Prix Pictet Prize, the Photoespaña Descubrimientos Award and the FOAM Paul Huff Award.

All copyright Alejandro Cartagena

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Robert Doisneau (1912 – 1994) was a French photographer. In the 1930s he used a Leica on the streets of Paris. He and Henri Cartier-Bresson were pioneers of photojournalism.
Doisneau was known for his modest, playful, and ironic images of amusing juxtapositions, mingling social classes, and eccentrics in contemporary Paris streets and cafes. Influenced by the work of André Kertész, Eugène Atget, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, in more than twenty books he presented a charming vision of human frailty and life as a series of quiet, incongruous moments.

Doisneau:
The marvels of daily life are so exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.

Doisneau’s work gives unusual prominence and dignity to children’s street culture; returning again and again to the theme of children at play in the city, unfettered by parents. His work treats their play with seriousness and respect.

All copyright the estate of Robert Doisneau.

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