Tag: Kehrer

Artistic intuition and the abstract in Jessica Backhaus' A Trilogy

Jessica Backhaus’ A Trilogy was born out of intuition. After 2015’s Six Degrees of Freedom, a project that saw the Berlin-based artist confronting personal topics of “identity, family, origin and memory” she craved something new; something rooted in minimalism and abstraction that would be wholly artistic and natural. Published now by Kehrer Verlag, the resulting book is a triptych of sorts, in which Backhaus takes her experimental sensibilities to a place of lucid colour, playful collage, and radical reduction. “I felt a cycle was finishing,” she says. “After Six Degrees of Freedom I felt empty, but not in a negative way. It was liberating. That notion of emptiness and void made me listen to how I was feeling.”

12 December 2017

In Paris: Guillaume Bression and Carlos Ayesta retrace routes back into the Fukushima Exclusion Zone

When an earthquake and tsunami struck the northeast coast of Japan on 11 March 2011, thousands lost their lives and many more were left homeless. Worse still, the quake triggered a devastating accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, forcing 80,000 more people to flee their homes. People have slowly returned but, despite huge efforts to make it safe, radiation persists. Many former residents have decided to stay away, and those who came back are still adjusting to life in the shadow of a still very present past. Photographers Guillaume Bression and Carlos Ayesta spent six months covering the immediate aftermath of the disaster for the French media, and decided to work on a much longer project together.

8 November 2017

In Paris: Sanne De Wilde's The Island of the Colorblind

Congenital achromatopsia is a hereditary condition in which the eye cannot detect colour – the cones in the retina do not function, leaving the vision to the rods alone, which only detect shades of grey. In most places the disease is rare, occuring in less than one in 30,000 people. But on the Micronesian island of Pingelap it’s much more common, present in more than 5% of the population. It’s an extraordinary phenomenon – and one that immediately gripped Belgian photographer Sanne De Wilde when she heard about it back in 2015

8 November 2017

In Paris: Peter van Agtmael's Buzzing at the Sill

Born in Washington DC in 1981, Peter van Agtmael studied history at Yale before moving into documentary photography. Largely focusing on America, his work considers issues such as power, race and class; he also works on the Israel/Palestine conflict and throughout the Middle East.

8 November 2017

Photo London: Nicola Lo Calzo on the Afro-Cuban legacy

Examining the cultural, religious, and ceremonial practices passed down through generations of African descendants in Cuba, Lo Calzo highlights the variety of identities within the country, and the ways in which they complement one another. Cohabiting “within a personal culture of exchange”, he says, they “borrow each other’s visions, customs and narratives”. He points to the “precarious balancing act” between the familiar Cuba, largely defined by the communist revolution and the society born out of it, and the diverse communities that actually make up the country.

11 May 2017