Kurt Tong

I know Kurt Tong’s from his People’s Park project, which I saw 2 years ago during the Jerwood Photo Prize exhibition in London. He had then finished the same MA in Documentary Photography at the LCC in London as I did last year.

Last week I came across his work again and I was amazed to see on how many new interesting projects he has worked on ever since. I really like all of them a lot. ‘In case it Rains in Heaven‘ will be published soon by Kehrer. “The project is a series of photographs of items made of joss paper to be burned as offerings for the dead. Traditionally, many Chinese believe that when a person dies, he leaves with no earthly possessions and it’s up to his descendants to provide for him in the afterlife until his reincarnation. Originally, coins and animals were buried with the dead, but when that proved too expensive for commoners, they began burning joss paper decorated with seals, stamps, silver or gold paint, as offerings to the spirits to ensure they lived well in the afterlife. In the last 50 years, these offerings have become more and more elaborate as objects are molded from the paper, some reflecting traditional culture, but many reflecting the consumer culture which is taking over China. Cars, washing machines and MacDonalds meals are made out of the paper, and entire shops have been set up selling an array of joss paper products.”

In case it Rains in Heaven‘ is for me interesting because I have never heard of these paper offerings. But I especially like it a lot because of Tong’s approach to document the Westernization of China by just photographing objects.

© Kurt Tong

© Kurt Tong

Jen Davis

I came already a couple of month ago across the work of Jen Davis and I already then liked it a lot. Davis has been working for the past eight years on a series of Self-Portrait’s dealing with issues regarding beauty, identity, and body image.

© Jen Davis

Katrin Trautner – Morninglove

I wonder I didn’t come earlier across Katrin Trautner’s work of older people having sex. It’s definitely a very interesting body of work and good for me to keep in mind.

“This work seeks to provide an insight into an aspect of everyday life to which a blind eye is generally turned. It endeavours to illustrate one of the manifold aspects of normal life experience.”

© Katrin Trautner

F-Stop – Arnau Oriol Sanchez

I just found out yesterday that my friend and ex-classmate Arnau made it on the cover of F-Stop. Arnau made a project about the Ghanaian community in London. It made me very happy to see his picture there, since I am a big fan of his work and style.

Ute Klein – Resonant Entanglement- Bodily Space

I saw Ute Klein’s work when she exhibited in the College in London (LCC) where I was doing my Master. She exhibited alongside with all her classmates from the Folkwang Hochschule, Essen. Her work was already then amongst of all my favorite ones. Yesterday, I came across her work again when I looked at photographers chosen as Germany’s emerging photographers for “Gute Aussichten – Junge Deutsche Fotografie”. Ute Klein was one of them and I was not surprised. Have a look at her work.

© Ute Klein

“There is something to be said about love in this work. It speaks from within the stacked up, twisted and flexed bodies. In raising and stretching and struggling. In folding, entwining and suspending. The depicted couples are realized as a three-dimensional interplay of sculptural form. Characteristic traits, emotional entanglements and bodily perception influence the performative act through body language. Bodies interact and resonate under the influence of others. The final form constructs the metaphorically seen, non-material (third) “Body of the Couple” and may be understood as the inversion of the concealed interior viewed on the outside: expansive, knotted or telescoped compositions represent complex emotional interconnections.”

Jim Goldberg – Open See

I visited on the weekend the show Open See from Jim Goldberg in the Photographers Gallery. I actually just had stopped by for a quick look and to warm up from the crazy cold outside because I had thought I wouldn’t be so much into his work. Without having any expectations I really liked it and found his approach quite inspiring.

In Open See Goldberg documents the experiences of people who travel from war torn, socially and economically devastated countries, to make new lives in Europe. They have left often violent, oppressive, poverty-stricken or AIDS ravaged communities, in search of stability and the promise of a better future.

What I liked the most about Goldberg’s approach that he combined so many different media such as Polaroids, video, written text, ephemera, large and medium format photographs to document the topic he was interested in. The Polaroids were often defaced and written on by the people they portray. The words and images combined to tell intimate stories of past and present experiences. Faces and features are sometimes scratched out, coloured in, or marked in some way.

I had to think of my project If you are lucky, you get old and how I felt that just photographs are sometimes such limitation to tell stories of the people I met. I was already thinking then that I should include text written by the elderly about their past, dreams or feelings and to combine it with their picture. When I will continue the project I will definitely keep Jim Goldberg in mind.

Quote – Raymond Moore

While researching for landscape photographers I came across Raymond Moore. I liked this quote of him very much:

“I’m just a go-between, things discover me, I don’t discover them. But in them I can find myself and grow”

©Raymond Moore

I thought I was alone

A friend sent me yesterday the link to I thought I was alone. There you can find a super nice collection of new photographers. Feels very fresh!

© Magdalena Fischer

Todd Deutsch

I came today across Todd Deutsch’s work. I like his project about his family “Chasing the family Drift” a lot. I appreciate especially his tender, humorous but still honest view about his every day life and about raising children.

See more of his project here.

© Todd Deutsch

Ed Ruscha

26 gasoline stations by ed ruscha