Photography

Great Britain is known for it’s grey and rainy weather, but where there’s rain, there might also be a rainbow. In this case a very colourful and shimmering rainbow: The drag queens and LGBTQI party-goers. Photographer Charley Williams portrays the queer community of her hometown Bristol, one of the most progressive and vibrant places in Britain. She manages to catch this liberating spirit in her work.     The photo of Montell Cunningham mid-transformation into his alter-ego Dominique Fleek got shortlisted for the Portrait of Britain 2018. For Charley it was important to show both the masculine and feminine aspects of his personality because it symbolizes the ongoing cultural shift towards gender and sexual fluidity.     Unfortunately, as a LGBTQ person of color Montell is confronted with discrimination on a daily basis and at higher risk of attack because of his orientation and race. With her work, Charley wants to make a statement and push back against all the hatred and homophobia.     Her main interest has always been how people present themselves to the world. The struggle between rejecting labels and still holding on to them to define who we are fascinates her. Therefore drag has been and still will be a huge topic for her in the future.     Charley says about herself, that she enjoys to photograph the wacky and interesting, anything that pushes the boundaries. Her love for watching people plays well with her artistic work, since her patience to wait for the right moment becomes visible in her photographs.     If you want to know more about Charley visit her website.

Back in the 1970s Laurie Simmons took a job in a factory which produced dolls and dollhouses. This was a determining step for her career, since she used the miniature objects for her own artistic work. She started to take photographs of everyday scenes, which she recreated with the toys. Laurie focused on her own experience during her childhood in the 1950s. The motives were defined by stern gender roles and the domestic ideal of the time – channeling the myth of the American dream.     Laurie soon moved on from her employment in the factory to being a full-time photographer, but dolls remained a recurrently element in her work. She always enjoyed working with dolls, because she was constantly able to keep the control. Also she wanted to confuse her audience whether the scenery was life-sized or not.   During the late 80s and the early 90s she created her series “Walking and Lying Objects”. A surreal combination of doll(-like) legs and lifeless objects like houses, cakes and accessories. In 2014, Laurie revived the project in a new series of "Walking Objects", as well as for photographs for Chanel in 2005 and a few award trophies.     For her book “The Love Doll”, Laurie documented her days with an high-end love doll from Japan. During the shooting of her first video work "The Music of Regret" (2006) in Tokyo one of her children drew her attention to a poster for the lifelike dolls. She immediately felt that this was exactly what she was looking for her entire life. The series covers their relationship from the day the doll got delivered onwards. The result is an illustration of the evolving relationship between the doll and the artist – and later between the first doll and the second one, which arrived one year later. This project took her work to a spooky new level of realism.     One of her latest photographic projects from 2015 "How We See" shows models with doll-eyes painted over their closed eyelids. The unearthly look give the observer the impression that the young girls are staring through their closed eyes. The inspiration behind this project were the problems of self-worth and identity that afflicts the fragile modern-day society. Laurie alludes to the online phenomenon of the “Doll Girl” culture, a community of people who alter themselves to look like their idols, such as Barbie, baby dolls, and Japanese anime characters. The sacrifices that are made to reach the idealistic look comprise from make-up and dresses, up to plastic surgery.     To complete the overview about Laurie Simmons' artistic biography, we want to recommend her film "My Art" (2016), which was written and directed by herself, as well as her being the main character. The feature-length film about an artist from New York portrays her relationship to her work, as well as Laurie becoming the performer of an identity, the artist, the object.   [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quPU12W-7dg[/embed]   All of the mentioned projects and more are part of a current retrospective "Big Camera/ Little Camera" by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. For more info about the artist click here.

“Better Living with Alpacas” by Austrian photographer Daniel Gebhart de Koekkoek is the calendar you never knew you needed. With his new project Daniel has unearthed the secret to eternal happiness. It isn’t money, fame or love — it’s alpacas.

A short while ago, by the end of summer, a couple of fishlike tails appeared at a laundromat in Downtown LA. On a closer look they seem to be tails of mermaids, hanging out of the big washing machines at the Laundry Zone in Arlington Heights. But how and why did they get there? Artist and author Olivia Erlanger has the answer.

Deep red masses of trees bleeding within an ocean of concrete buildings presented in muted tones, an unpleasant yellow sky dominating the atmosphere. At first glance, the pictures of Vicente Munoz’s ongoing series „Sublimis“ seem to throw the observer into a dystopic, yet fictional world. But taking a closer look, one realizes that the images portray the photographer’s hometown Guayaquil, a 16th century port city and Ecuador’s commercial capital.

Over the last three years, the London-based photographer Peter Zelewski took portraits of identical twins, which resulted in his project “Alike But Not Alike.” He explores the similarities as well as the striking differences between twins and askes: how identical are they really?

We’ve all seen our fair share of cocky dancers, but they’re usually in a club after 2am pretending they’ve got “swagger” and they rarely look anything like this. Photographer and visual artist Ernest Goh, however, has created a series of images that highlight the beauty and character that chickens can exhibit when given a chance.

Peter Funch has photographed the same people on the same street for nine years.

After a 10-year-long hiatus Polaroid turns toward analogue instant photography again. Last week the company launched its new brand Polaroid Originals, that focuses solely on analogue photography.