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Month: October 2017

Just Not Kosher combines cooking and cutting-edge images

Neither Rick Pushinsky nor his father, Steven Morris, are chefs. Pushinsky is a professional photographer with 10 years experience doing editorial shoots for the likes of The Sunday Times Style, Vogue and the FT. His father is an optician. But that didn’t stop them from putting together a series of 21 recipe cards – a three-course meal for every day of the week – inspired by the family’s Ashkenazi heritage, adapted dishes from dining in foreign restaurants, and Morris’ “60 years of making a mess in the kitchen”. Pushinsky’s bright and playful photography pairs up with his fathers’ recipes and stories, and he’s also added in relevant family photographs. A flaming crêpe falls before a bright yellow backdrop to accompany a recipe for Crêpes Suzette, for example; a sliver of sea bass draped delicately over a towering structure of fennel represents, well, Sea Bass on Fennel. The more artistic representations are the ones that stand out, and they were also the most tricky to set up.

31 October 2017

Zsolt Ficsór finds beauty in everyday Budapest

At 28, Zsolt Ficsór is part of this new generation, using his collective, MAMA Photobooks, to help promote local artists’ self-published work. In October Ficsór brought MAMA to Photo Book London at The Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, for example, while in September, he was invited to take part in the five-day Magnum workshop at the Capa Contemporary Photography Centre in Budapest. Lead by celebrated Magnum photographers Antoine d’Agata and Matt Black, this workshop was a masterclass in developing his style of urban documentary photography, he says, which stems from his fascination with “interacting with this surreal and unreal world that we are living in right here here, right now”.

31 October 2017

How The Face changed British culture – and photography and publishing

“The photography in The Face highlighted the important fact that none of these cultural things existed in a vacuum,” says Paul Gorman. “It was nearly always reportage.” In his new book The Story of The Face: The Magazine That Changed Culture, the long-standing author and music journalist hopes to show just how important the iconic magazine was in shifting British perspectives on culture – and how photography helped it do so. Founded in 1980 by Nick Logan, the same man behind NME and Smash Hits, The Face was one of the first UK magazines to champion youth and counter-culture, fashion, music and film under one banner, and in doing so, argues Gorman, helped launch some of the most influential music, fashion and documentary photographers of our time, including Sheila Rock, Corinne Day, Juergen Teller, Nick Knight and Ewen Spencer.

30 October 2017

Shooting the Bitter Summer on Bari's Canalone Beach

Puglia’s undulating coastline on the Adriatic and Ionian seas offers respite to locals during the summer months, when temperatures can rise above 40°C in southern Italy. August in particular is a time when whole extended families flee to the region’s coastal spots to escape the prolonged, infernal heatwaves. But Puglia’s medieval hill towns, teetering on clifftops overlooking sparkling water, are out of reach to millions of Italians in the grip of economic hardship and many Apulians seek relief closer to their own doorsteps. Photography duo Jean-Marc Caimi and Valentina Piccinni had been working together in Puglia on two projects focused on environmental issues before deciding to make their latest work, Bitter Summer, documenting holidaymakers on a makeshift beach in Puglia’s capital Bari, the largest port city in the Adriatic.

30 October 2017

New show Catharsis makes the private public

“Her project talks about the identity that the state wants women to project in public,” says Vivienne Gamble, director of Seen Fifteen and now curator of the show Catharsis for Belfast Exposed. “She comes from a family where they didn’t have those rules behind closed doors at home. She was conflicted about having this public-facing image, and this different, much more relaxed and liberal, private existence.” She’s talking about Shenasmenah, a project by Iranian-born photographer, filmmaker and curator Amak Mahmoodian included in the three-person Catharsis show.

20 October 2017

A sense of the strange in Zhao Qian's Offcut, the edge

“I hope the project can make the audience feel like they walking through a cloud of mist.” Zhao Qian, a Chinese photographer living in San Francisco, has recently been announced as a runner-up in this year’s BJP Breakthrough Awards. His series, Offcut, the edge, is inspired in part by the feeling of jetlag, which he describes as creating a fog on his surroundings.

20 October 2017