Los Angeles-based artist Robert LeBlanc is a self-taught photographer with an aptitude for capturing non-traditional communities. From firefighters to hurricane survivors, his images of life lived on the fringes of society offer an eccentric glimpse into otherwise rarely-pictured social sp...
Portfolios
Ruizhe Hong: So Close When You Look Away
By Laura Chen - 01/23/23
If infatuation could talk, Chinese photographer Ruizhe Hong has rendered its speech visible in So Close When You Look Away: a series of soft, intimate and sensual images that feel like love letters delivered inside a heart-sealed envelope.Read More
The Royal College of Art – Photography Department Graduates of 2022
Gabriela Gawęda - 10/24/22
Mateo Ruiz González: Chilluns’ Croon
By Linda Zhengová - 10/12/22
Mateo Ruiz González (b. 1989, Colombia) is a photographer and researcher based in New York. He is also the co-founder of Antics Publication, a publishing house focusing on inclusivity and the open photo...
Davide Degano Romanzo Meticcio
By Gabriela Gawęda - 10/5/22
Katerina Lymar: Call me a slut
By Gabriela Gawęda - 09/1/22
She opens the viewers’ eyes to things that we don’t want to or are too much in a hurry to notice. Meet Katerina Lymar, a Ukrainian photographer who with the maturity of a professional doesn’t shy away from representing topics of injustice that for some ma...
Lewis Khan: ABQ
by Gabriela Gawęda - 07/5/22
It is a fact that Albuquerque, abbreviated ABQ is the most populated city in the state of New Mexico. It is also a fact that its population reaches just above 2 million. Yet the character of the city does not let itself be defined that easily by a Google search res...
Gian Marco Sanna: PARADISE
By Gabriela Gawęda - 06/17/22
Gian Marco Sanna (b. 1993, Italy) experiments in his photography with digital and analogue techniques. His work dives into the ecological and social consciousness where myths collide with reality. Sanna follows natural landscapes at the same time discovering human intervention in...
Colin Delfosse: Fulu Act
By Laura Chen - 03/21/22
How can a country with no industries today become a victim of over-consumption?
Since the Berlin conference in 1884, Congo has been at the forefront of globalization. The advent of the country as the leading exporter of cobalt (a key ore in the construction of smartphones) is the ...
Wanda Tuerlinckx: Androids
By Laura Chen - 12/19/21
In the work of Flemish photographer Wanda Tuerlinckx (b.1969, Belgium) the world of science and art collide, resulting in fascinating images that question today’s technologically advanced society and the ever-evolving relationship between humans and machines. In ...
Weronika Gęsicka: Traces
By Laura Chen - 10/21/21
Fascinated by scientific and pseudoscientific theories, Weronika Gęsicka’s (b. 1984, Poland) projects explore mnemonics and various mechanisms concerning human memory and veracity. Fundamental to her practice is archival material, which she sources from the internet: old press...
Kensuke Koike and Thomas Sauvin: No More, No Less
By Laura Chen - 09/20/21
In 2015, French artist and collector Thomas Sauvin (b. 1983) acquired an exercise book, produced by an unknown photography student from Shanghai University in the early 1980s, which he rescued from a recycling plant in the outskirts of Beijing for about 18 euros. The book, which comprises ...
Anabela Pinto: Precious Things
by Sophie Beerens - 07/28/21
The cult of technology takes center stage in Anabela Pinto’s photographic series Precious Things, as she explores mankind’s precarious relationship with the devices tha...
Tom Butler: Self Portraits
GUP Team - 07/19/21
English photographer Tom Butler (b. 1979) contorts his body, holding elegant poses that show only the top of his head. “The work reads like a contemporary dance piece; Butler’s body casting shapes that confuse and intrigue — his bald head the small, ever-present reminder th...
Igor Elukov: Book of Miracles
by Sophie Beerens - 07/7/21
GUP Magazine is media-partnering with Belfast Photo Festival this year. For the occasion, to underline our mutual interest in addressing global issues by way of photography and to make these works available to a wider audience, we have been given the opportunity to select and hi...
Dawn Kim: Whistling in the Dark
by Sophie Beerens - 05/4/21
‘Whistling in the Dark’ by the artist Dawn Kim (b. 1989, South Korea) presents a growing collection of black and white photographs taken at various locations across the United States and abroad — bound...
Bebe Blanco Agterberg: A mal tiempo, buena cara
By Sophie Beerens - 04/20/21
Bebe Blanco Agterberg (b. 1995) explores the murky waters of historical truth through the lens of post-Francoist Spain, and the far-reaching implications of the Pact of Forgetting (Pacto del Olvido), a political decision brought about by both Leftist and Rig...
Yichen Zhou: Untitled & Daily Talk
By Sophie Beerens - 04/16/21
Every year, artist Yichen Zhou (b. 1986, China) returns to the expansive plains of her birthplace of Inner Mongolia. There, she creates surreal images — usually depicting herself, performing a series of acts ranging f...
Cansu Yıldıran: The Dispossessed
By Sophie Beerens - 04/2/21
Deep in a valley of the Kusmer Highlands, in the Black Sea region of Turkey, lies the village and ancestral homeland of photographer Cansu Yıldıran: Çaykara. Tradition decrees that the women of this village may not own the homes or the land that they live in —...
Isabelle Wenzel – Body Movin’
GUP Team - 03/29/21
“Let your backbone flip but don’t slip a disc, let your spine unwind, just take a risk.” This excerpt from the Beastie Boys song Body Movin’ very much applies to the artistic work of Isabelle Wenzel (b. 1982, Germany), whose career is defined by an extensive, and remarka...
Joana Choumali: Ça Va Aller
GUP team - 03/24/21
Joana Choumali (b. 1974, Ivory Coast) expresses her artistic vision through photography and mixed media, touching on issues of identity and notions of beauty in relation to the body. Much of her practice focuses on Africa and derives from her own experience as a black African woman....
Thomas Vandenberghe: In the time before us, there was a time before us
By Sophie Beerens - 03/15/21
The works of Belgian photographer Thomas Vandenberghe (1985) can come across as vaguely familiar – like a whistled melody one can’...
VINCENT DELBROUCK – CHAMPÚ
GUP team - 03/10/21
Vincent Delbrouck (b. 1975, Belgium), also known as “V.D.”, spent of a lot of time in Havana as a photographer at the end of the 1990s. Then he left Cuba for years. When he returned, in 2014, he didn’t want to make a documentary about the pe...
Cecilia Sordi Campos: Tem Bigato Nessa Goiaba
GUP Team - 03/3/21
In this project, Brazilian-born, Melbourne-based photographic artist Cecilia Sordi Campos (b. 1989) considers the parallels between her migration to Australia and her separation from her partner of ten years, and how this has impacted the life she’s living. Tem Bigato Nessa Go...
Silvia de Giorgi: Landscapes Pieces / Liquid Landscapes
GUP team - 02/17/21
By experimenting with alternative photographic processes as well as using drawing and on-site rock rubbings, Silvia De Giorgi (b. 1992, Italy) aims to reveal experiential knowledge of the natural environment that encompasses both its physical and social past. She is drawn to sit...
Prin Rodriguez – Los Hijos de Pariacaca
GUP Team - 02/15/21
Pariacaca is the name of an “apu”, a divinity embodied in a mountain in the Peruvian Andes, located between Lima and Junin. The importance of Pariacaca in Andean spirituality predates the process of Spanish colonisation in the 16th century when local religions and belief systems we...
Gerardo Vizmanos: Searching for Utopia
BY SOPHIE BEERENS - 02/12/21
‘Searching for Utopia’ by Gerardo Vizmanos (b. 1975, Spain) arises from an understanding that utopia itself might not exist yet we can still imagine that another reality from t...
Marta Bogdańska: SHIFTERS
by Patrycja Rozwora - 01/29/21
For her ongoing project SHIFTERS, Marta Bogdańska – a visual artist, photographer, filmmaker and cultural manager based in Poland – took on a challenge: presenting a history from the perspective of animals.
...
JILLIAN FREYER – 42 WAYNE
GUP Team - 01/18/21
Throughout her work, Jillian Freyer (b. 1989, US) uses female bodies to explore the experience of touch, and of emotional and physical endurance. Witnessed events and staged performances serve as a way to seek new intimacies between herself and her subjects. Physical sensations ...
Délio Jasse – J’ai le Devoir de Mémoire
GUP Team - 12/25/20
Délio Jasse (b. 1980, Angola) is known for applying analogue techniques (painting, slide projection) to vernacular images (found passport photos, family albums) that reference the colonial history of Europe and deeply connect with diasporic issues. These appropriations and crea...
Lucia Sekerková Bláhová – Vrăjitoare
GUP team - 12/16/20
Lucia Sekerková Bláhová (b. 1991, Slovakia) photographed the “vrăjitoare”, or witches, of Romania’s Wallachian Roma community. She collaborated with ethnologist Ivana Šusterová, an expert in the everyday life and culture of the Roma community. Together, they document...
Michal Chelbin – How To Dance The Walz
GUP Team - 12/12/20
Michal Chelbin (b. 1974, Israel) spent three years traveling around Ukraine, documenting life inside the country’s military boarding schools. Her pictures are populated by young boys dressed in immaculate regimental uniforms and official military attire, and young girls wearin...
VALERY POSHTAROV: THE MONK AND HIS FAITH
GUP Team - 12/7/20
Valery Poshtarov (b. 1986, Bulgaria) has created black and white portraits of monks* from different monasteries in Bulgaria. These portraits are presented as diptychs, with each priest juxtaposed with his rosary. Within the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, this string of beads is typi...
ELENA HELFRECHT: PLEXUS
GUP Team - 11/30/20
The work of Elena Helfrecht (b. 1992, Germany) revolves around inner space and the phenomena of consciousness, emerging from an autobiographical context and expanding into the surreal and the fantastic – and even, at times, the grotesque. Helfrecht grew up in the Bavarian coun...
Bart Koetsier: Parisian Wanderings
by Erik Vroons - 11/16/20
Bart Koetsier (b. 1975), a Dutch portrait and documentary photographer based in Paris, loves wandering the streets, to just go out for a stroll – or what in French could be described as a ‘dérive’:Read More
Ulrich Lebeuf: Khaos
GUP Team - 11/2/20
Ulrich Lebeuf (b. 1972, France) has covered every ‘act’ of the Gilets Jaunes protests since November 2018 – as a photojournalist. With KHAOS, he approaches this period of unprecedented social struggle with a renewed eye; far removed from more conventional ways of visualisi...
Elsa Leydier: Transatlántica
by Patrycja Rozwora - 10/30/20
In 2015, the French artist Elsa Leydier (b. 1988) moved to Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and started exploring Brazilian and other South American societies. Through her work, the artist invites the audience to question the dominant ways in which photography is exploited to represent t...
Antigone Kourakou: Episodes
GUP Team - 10/26/20
The work of Antigone Kourakou (b. 1979, Greece) discreetly leads us to the threshold of a quite unanticipated, silent introspection. By stirring up deep-rooted images and moments, her photography prompts the viewer to fill in the blanks. These elliptical scenes and oblique perso...
IGOR PJÖRRT: BETELGEUSE
GUP Team - 10/19/20
For Igor Pjörrt (b. 1996, Portugal), who developed a fascination for astronomy in his late teens, Betelgeuse – a red supergiant star in the Orion constellation that is nearing its death – serves as a metaphor for the fragility of a queer relationship. More specifically, he draws parallels be...
EGOR FEDOSOV: 1:26-3:24
GUP team - 10/14/20
The works of Egor Fedosov (b. 2000, Russia), produced by using digital photography and post-processing techniques, are not just photography. His rather mysterious, high-contrast ‘rephotographs’ are reminiscent of the photocopied quality of ‘zines’ and are made according ...
Jasmine Clarke: Shadow of the Palm
by Patrycja Rozwora - 10/12/20
Every now and then, Jasmine Clarke (b. 1995, USA) has a jamais vu, the phenomenon of experiencing a situation that one recognises in some fashion, but that nonetheless seems novel and unfamiliar. This is known to be a common experi...
PHILIP J BRITTAN: GHOSTS ARE REAL
GUP team - 10/10/20
Philip J. Brittan (b. 1973, United Kingdom) has created a series of images based on long night walks. These images are as much about feelings experienced – the sense of a vanished world – as the representation of certain places.
Ghosts Are Real was created during a diff...
Vikesh Kapoor: See You At Home
by Patrycja Rozwora - 09/4/20
In ‘See You at Home’ the Pennsylvania based photographer and musician Vikesh Kapoor (b. 1985) explores the latent sense of loss from one’s heritage, while ageing as an immigrant in a non-native culture. It is a personal narrative, centered around family hi...
Sharon Castellanos: Duro de Morir
by Patrycja Rozwora - 08/31/20
For as long as she can remember, the Peruvian photographer Sharon Castellanos (b. 1989) was intrigued by the medium of photography. It started by collecting pictures, which her father – a radio operator on a merchant ship – to...
LouLou d’Aki: They call us dreamers, but we’re the once who don’t sleep
by Patrycja Rozwora - 08/28/20
The work of Loulou d’Aki (b. 1978, Sweden) evolves around the ideas of freedom, and how human beings are conditioned by social structures. Her long-term photographic project, ‘They call us dreamers, but we’re the once who don’t sleep’, results from...
André Penteado: Farroupilha
by Patrycja Rozwora - 08/21/20
Farroupilha is the third part of the Rastros, Tracos e Vestigios (Trails, Traces and Remains) project, in which the São Paulo based photographer André Penteado (b. 1970) reflects on the formation of Brazilian subjectivity by means of a visual investigation of ...
Anthony Bila: Izambulo zabantwana Benkholo
by Patrycja Rozwora - 08/14/20
In his series, ‘Izambulo zabantwana Benkholo’, which can be translated to “Revolutions from the children of God”, Johannesburg based director and photographer Anthony Bila (b.1986) explores how young people in South Africa navigat...
CAMILA FALCÃO: ABAIXA QUE É TIRO
by Talita Virginia - 08/7/20
It is somehow complex to translate “Abaixa que é tiro”, the title of the latest series of Camila Falcão (b. 1977, Brazil). It is a reference to the reactions of the portrayed and their friends, who started commenting ‘Abaixa que é tiro!&...
Sandra Mickiewicz: Proud of the origin & Happy Club
by Patrycja Rozwora - 07/22/20
Sandra Mickiewicz (b. 1992) is a Polish documentary photographer who lives and works in North London. In 2007, her family immigrated to the United Kingdom. Passionate with people and their stories, Mickiewicz traces various communities and by gaining their trust...
LINDLEY WARREN MICKUNAS: MATERNAL SHEET
By Linda Zhengová - 07/7/20
In ‘Maternal Sheet’, Lindley Warren Mickunas (b.1988, the USA) is reflecting on the complexity of parent-child relationships and the conceptual weight of carrying the past.
Her photographs function as re-enactments based on Warren Mickunas’ familial history performed...
NICO KRIJNO: LOCKDOWN COLLAGES
By Linda Zhengová - 07/3/20
Visual artist Nico Krijno (b. 1981, South Africa) is based outside of Cape Town, living on a rural farm where both his studio and house are located. With his wife and two daughters away, Krijno started to work on this series of ‘lockdown’ collages in acute seclusion. The resu...
LEONARD SURYAJAYA: FALSE IDOL
By Linda Zhengová - 06/29/20
Leonard Suryajaya (b. 1988, Indonesia) is a multi-media artist who recently won the First Place in the CENTER’s Excellence in Multimedia Award. In his award-winning project ‘False Idol’, he ...
SANTOLO FELACO: SPLEEN
By Linda Zhengová - 06/26/20
In his latest series ‘Spleen’ Santolo Felaco (b. 1984, Italy) explores the notion of melancholy by investigating the society’s current state of mind, posing underlying existential questions about the era we now live in.
Felaco was originally inspired by the French po...
BRANDON TAUSZIK: PALE BLUE DRESS
By Linda Zhengová - 06/22/20
In ‘Pale Blue Dress’, Brandon Tauszik (b. 1986, the USA) documents the world of Civil War Re-enactments in northern and central California. The images provide an intimate look into these complex spaces, emboldening participants to brandish the Southern cause while convenient...
Irish Travellers
- 06/20/20
In autumn 2017, Rebecca Moseman (b. 1975, United States) was given the opportunity to photograph a closed Irish community, one that still maintains a culture and traditions whose origins are lost in time. These so-called Travellers are a proud and reclusive people, who split off from set...
GIULIA PARLATO: DIACHRONICLES
By Linda Zhengová - 06/19/20
Giulia Parlato (b.1993, Italy) is an artist based in London and Palermo. She focuses on staged photography connected to themes of history, myths and object-hood. In her work, she examines and challenges the medium’s preconceived ability to document truth, especially in the scie...
SAM GREGG: BLIGHTY
By Linda Zhengová - 06/17/20
Sam Gregg (b.1990, the UK) spent many years abroad – up to the point he almost forgot what it means to be British. His ongoing project ‘Blighty’ is a search for Gregg’s heritage in the streets of London. The title is a slang term deriving from the Urdu word vilāyatī, me...
SHANE LYNAM: FIFTY HIGH SEASONS
GUP Editorial - 06/15/20
Even though his passport says he is Irish, photographer Shane Lynam (b. 1980) seems to have a deep connection with France. His project Fifty High Seasons is focused entirely on the development of the Languedoc-Roussillon coastal region in southern France, known as the “Miss...
MARIA MAVROPOULOU: INNER STATE
By Linda Zhengová - 06/8/20
Maria Mavropoulou (b. 1989, Greece) completed her studies (MFA) at the Athens School of Fine Arts in 2018. ‘Inner State’ is a series of photographs she created as a student, between 2014-2016, documenting the atmosphere of crisis in Greece.
Lost in grey and tranquilli...
THADDÉ COMAR: HOW WAS YOUR DREAM?
By Linda Zhengová - 06/3/20
Thaddé Comar (b.1993, France) is a Paris and Lausanne based photographer juggling between commissions, editorials and personal projects. ‘How was your dream?’ is his latest documentary series portraying the recent Hong Kong protests, realised between June and October 2019....
BRYAN SCHUTMAAT: VESSELS
By Linda Zhengová - 05/27/20
Bryan Schutmaat (b. 1983, the USA) is a Texan documentary photographer who generally sets his work in remote places – dealing with ordinary working people, the land and aspects of rural life. In his ongoing series ‘Vessels’, he photographically explores the American Sou...
CRISTIANO VOLK: MÉLAINA CHOLÉ
By Linda Zhengová - 05/22/20
Cristiano Volk (b. 1987, Italy) photographically explores the concept of melancholia, an enduring feeling of great sadness or even a form of extreme depression. ‘Mélaina Cholé’ presents a metaphorical visualisation of how melancholy – a phenomenon that according to recent...
JEAN-MARC CAIMI AND VALENTINA PICCINNI: LOCKDOWN RAMADAN
By Linda Zhengová - 05/13/20
Artist duo Jean-Marc Caimi (b. 1966, France) and Valentina Piccinni (b. 1982, Italy) came to a creative approach to document the rather extraordinary and unprecedented celebration of Ramadan, the Islamic holy feast, in 2020. For ‘Lockdown Ramadan’ they made s...
AGNIESZKA SEJUD: HOAX
By Linda Zhengová - 05/11/20
‘HOAX’ by Agnieszka Sejud (b. 1991, Poland) is a story of Poland’s self-delusion. Sejud sheds light on a country where European political standards are considered radical and the mere idea of separating church from the state immediately creates unrest and turmoil. To highlight the occurrenc...
IGNACIO COLÓ: AT THE SAME TIME
By Linda Zhengová - 05/6/20
Ignacio Coló (b. 1980, Argentina) has a background in photography history and filmmaking and he is currently working for a major Argentinian newspaper Sunday Magazine of La Nacion. For ‘At the Same Time’, his latest photography project, he documented the life of the 51-year-...
ALEXEY VASILYEV: MY DEAR YAKUTIA
By Linda Zhengová - 05/1/20
Alexey Vasilyev (b.1985, Russia) provides an insider and honest perspective on his homeland. In his ongoing series ‘My Dear Yakutia’, he portrays the way people live in the largest region of Russia throughout the year. Being a local himself, Vasilyev manages to capture the el...
MADHAVAN PALANISAMY: APPA AND OTHER ANIMALS
By Linda Zhengová - 04/24/20
In ‘appa and other animals’, Madhavan Palanisamy (b. 1975, India) introduces his dad as the main source of inspiration. Last year, his father suffered from a partial stroke that, unfortunately, made him immobile. “Even after my father lost his eyesight, he continued seeing ...
MYRIAM BOULOS: TENDERNESS
By Linda Zhengová - 04/15/20
Myriam Boulos (b.1992, Lebanon) came to world right after the Lebanese Civil War. The country was fragmented and required urgent transformation. At the age of 16, Boulos started capturing Beirut to critically reflect on the city, its people, and her place among them. She uses the...
MICHAEL SWANN: NOEMA
By Linda Zhengová - 04/10/20
Michael Swann (b. 1990, the UK) is currently completing his MA in Photography at the University of West of England (UWE Bristol). For, ‘Noema’, his latest body of work, he investigates the search for the presence of the Virgin Mary. Specifically, in two locations in which she...
ANDREJS STROKINS: COSMIC SADNESS
By Linda Zhengová - 04/6/20
In his project ‘Cosmic Sadness’ Andrejs Strokins (b. 1984, Latvia) offers novel perspectives on street photography by capturing his surroundings with a phone while using blue, desaturated and grainy filters – aimed to evoke the ‘blues’ as experienced in the current ‘digital’ generat...
INTERPRETING THE PLACE: ISRAEL ARIÑO
- 03/27/20
Israel Ariño (b. 1974, Catalonia) tests the limits of what is representable. His two books ‘La gravetat del lloc’ (2017) and ‘Voyage en pays du clermontois’ (2019) might be visually distinct from one another but both focus on a similar interest: subjecti...
LAURA KOOLEN: PERFECTION
By Linda Zhengová - 03/25/20
Laura Koolen (b.1995, the Netherlands) is a Dutch photographer who uses staged photography to challenge social taboos and delve into human frailty. In her graduation project ‘Perfection’, she explores the unrealistic ideal of beauty in society driven by perfection.
The...
José Luis Cuevas: On the Resistance of Bodies
- 03/16/20
The project On the Resistance of Bodies by José Luis Cuevas (b. 1973, Mexico) collects material that signifies violence and the vulnerability of the human body, such as photographs of crime scenes, (nude) portraits, morgue images and car accidents. Shot in Mexico City, the series represe...
Fatma Fahmy: Once There Was a Tram
- 03/16/20
Fatma Fahmy (b. 1991), an Egyptian documentary photographer, currently living in Cairo, has been selected as the first winner of the Daniele Tamagni Grant. The grant aims to encourage young photographers from t...
EXHIBITION: NIGHT WATCHING BY RINEKE DIJKSTRA
By Linda Zhengová - 03/12/20
Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959, The Netherlands) is well-recognised for portraying specific social groups, such as mothers, adolescents, teenagers and soldiers. The key theme of her work – both still photography and video – is vulnerability, which she extracts from her subjects...
ALBA ZARI: THE Y
By Linda Zhengová - 03/10/20
At the age of twenty-five, Alba Zari (b.1987) found out that she and her brother don’t share the genes of their Thai father. This sparked a search for her biological roots, the only clue being a name written on a business card. When nothing came up, she decided to apply her pho...
ISABELLA CONVERTINO: TO SHOOT THE SUN
- 03/2/20
Traditional understandings tell us that when you’re born part of your identity is already set, especially in relationship to gender. In western heteronormative traditions, generally, boys are made to believe they can achieve anything, provided they’re tough. Impossible as it is to shoot the ...
LOÏC SEGUIN: HALF-LIGHT
- 02/28/20
For Loïc Seguin (b. 1970, France), the way to deal with mourning was to establish direct connections with people around him. He finds these people in Belleville, a multi-ethnic and vibrant Parisian neighbourhood where he approaches locals from all walks of life – around t...
EXHIBITION: FOLLOW ME BY GUY BOURDIN
By Linda Zhengová - 02/24/20
Guy Bourdin (1928 – 1991) is internationally recognized for his provocative and convention resisting images. This May, The Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography in Moscow will present Bourdin’s retrospective exhibition which will feature more than fifty of the artist’s mo...
FEDERICO ESTOL: HÉROES DEL BRILLO
- 02/23/20
Each day in La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, a group of 3000 masked shoe shiners flood the streets. They disguise themselves in order to avoid recognition and discrimination, as their job is looked down upon by society. The photobook Shine Heroes is the result of a three-year collaboration between...
OVER.STATE
- 02/19/20
Over.State is the first photographic project from Ilias Georgiadis (1990, Greece). It is a personal story of a young and lost person who is searching for freedom and love – an effort to explain the human condition of expressing intimacy, closeness and freedom.
Georgiadis describes ph...
PIOTR ZBIERSKI – ECHOES SHADES
- 02/11/20
In his art practice, Piotr Zbierski (b. 1987, Poland) touches on the meta-kinship between people who do not necessarily share the same culture or the same beliefs. For his recent project Echoes Shades (soon to become a book) he spotlights people living close to nature and communi...
MASHA SVYATOGOR: EVERYBODY DANCE!
By Linda Zhengová - 02/7/20
Masha Svyatogor (b. 1989, Belarus), a visual artist currently based in Minsk, primarily works with the medium of photography. The title of her series ‘Everybody Dance!’ is a reference to a phrase exclaimed in the Soviet comedy film ‘Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future’, ...
FUKUSHIMA NOW
- 02/5/20
Benjamin Kis (1986, Germany) started out as an autodidact, self-trained artist, followed by obtaining a Bachelor of the Arts in Munich. His main focus is on documentary photography and portraits, and he is often drawn to stories that are not widely accessible.
One of these...
EXHIBITION: TO HANS BY VIVIAN KEULARDS
By Linda Zhengová - 01/29/20
Vivian Keulards (b. 1970, the Netherlands) breaks her silence around the addiction and death of her brother Hans, who was only thirty-eight years of age when he died in a hotel room in Berlin. His sudden cardiac arrest was caused by drug abuse. To Hans presents a personal story w...
EXHIBITION: ADORNED – THE FASHIONABLE SHOW AT FOAM
- 01/9/20
Until 11 March 2020, Foam Museum Amsterdam presents Adorned – The Fashionable Show. Although the title might suggest so, the show is not purely centred around the concepts of fashion or what we wear. Rather, the main focus is on the notions of culture and identity, which continue to evolve ...
JUAN BRENNER – INSIDIA
- 12/13/19
For Insidia, a personal project, Guatemala-born photographer Juan Brenner revisits his past after 10 years of sobriety. It altogether reflects on his years of addiction to drugs, night of wandering and the according chaos – and all the absurdities such a state of being brings...
BIEKE DEPOORTER AT NRW-FORUM DÜSSELDORF
- 11/21/19
From November 22, 2019 to February 16, 2020 the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf is showing the work of five series from Magnum photographer Bieke Depoorter (b. 1986, Belgium). This constitutes the most comprehensive solo exhibition of the photographer to date.
Across these five different pr...
OBAKE
- 11/20/19
The work of Célia Hay (b. 1991, France) questions image production with a highly physical approach to the image. She is interested in what happens between individuals d...
SOLE HARLEM
- 11/14/19
In the series Sole Harlem, Louise Amelie (Germany, 1991) and Aljaz Fuis (Germany) show the neighborhood of Harlem – only and purely Harlem. The series is the result of a year of living in and walking around this New York neighborhood. Everythin...
SWIMMING CLASS AND JUNGLE BEES
- 11/7/19
Jurre Rompa (The Netherlands, 1990) grew up in Amsterdam and is specialized in portrait and documentary photography. Here he worked for a dutch film distributor and then moved to the island of Zanzibar for six months where he started his career as a photographer. He started his ...
THE COLLECTIVE LANDSCAPE
- 11/4/19
It has become extremely difficult to protect the Dutch landscape since pieces of land are claimed by multiple parties at once, while there is only limited space in the small country. In the battle for this limited space, the economically weak are given the least priority.
For The Collectiv...
CREATURES
- 10/16/19
“I feel a strange sense of melancholy when I look at my photographs. As if they represent moments that I did not necessarily experience, distant moments, which generate contrasting emotions, oscillating between my present and my past.” Marta Blue (b. 1985, Italy) specialises ...
EXCEPT THE CLOUDS
- 10/14/19
Living in uncertain times ignites the desire in humans to resist or to revolt. In Except the Clouds, Berangère Fromont (France) brings us to a philosophical contemplation of chaos, enhancing the notion of resistance present in each of us.
Athen...
CLAXO M.
- 10/2/19
Over the last couple decades, we have become more and more interested in – if not to say obsessed with – extraterrestrial life. However: never have we had any proof, no signs of life beyond our own planet. What if they are in nothing similar to what we imagined? Carl Sagan, for example, g...
LOSING GREENLAND & THE END OF LOVE
- 09/26/19
On the first day of August 2019, 12.5 billion tonnes of ice melted in Greenland, which is reshaping the largest island we have on Earth. In the series Siellä missä jää sulaa (literally translated: Where the ice melts) the Finnish photographer and filmmaker Heidi Piiroinen ta...
SOMETHING IS PUSHING
- 09/18/19
In the series Something is Pushing, Igor Pisuk (b. 1984, Poland) shows a collection of black-and-white photographs, as well as vibrant colour portraits and close-ups. The photographs in this collection are truthful and raw, and they show both the beautiful and darker sides of spe...
THE BIRDS
- 09/9/19
For the past six years, Ulla Deventer (b. 1984, Germany) has been doing long-term research on female sex-workers in Europe, specifically in Brussels, Athens and Paris, and since 2017 in Accra, Ghana. In her work, which is best described as visual storytelling with a strong focus ...
THREE THOUSAND TIGERS
- 09/4/19
Irene Fenara (b. 1990, Bologna, Italy) is an artist who pushes the boundaries of photography. For example, she has been working with found material and creating images with scanners. More recently, she has been researching footage sourced from surveillance cameras. She has been u...
ALIENATION
- 08/30/19
The photo project Alienation by France-based photographer Read More
PETŐFI’S CORPSE
- 08/12/19
In the series Petőfi’s Corpse, Hungarian photographer Tomoya Imamura (b. 1991, Germany) shows the Hungarian present, where a post-socialist reality nourishes a new form of nationalism. The name of the project comes from the story of Sándor Petőfi, the national poet of the Hungar...
MONCHEGORSK
- 08/6/19
Monchegorsk is a so-called monotown: a place where the local economy and life on the whole rely on a single or a small number of related industries. Apparently, the post-Soviet space is home to about three hundred monotowns. The question of the purpose of such towns bothered photographer Vale...
EVELYN BECKETT
- 08/1/19
In this work, Will Harris (b. 1990, United States) confronts the complexities of his grandmother Evelyn Beckett’s dementia. By juxtaposing images of his childhood’s house with photographs that show the erased faces of his granny at different stages of her life, he restores the pi...
PENDULUM
- 07/29/19
Stefania Orfanidou‘s (b. 1989, Greece) connection to Italy started 12 years before she was born. Her parents met in the Italian city of L’Aquila and fell in love. So, Orfanidou grew up absorbing a lot of their romantic stories related to the region and one day even visited the plac...
BARRIO CHINO, HABANA
- 07/25/19
Barrio Chino, Habana is an ongoing photographic project by Sean Alexander Geraghty (b. 1987, France) in which he aims to document the remaining fragments of the once largest and most glorious Chinatown in Latin America. However, when you dig deeper, you realise that the story of its orig...
SPECIALLY FOR YOU
- 07/22/19
During one of the travels around her home country, photographer Karol Palka (b. 1991, Poland) met an uncommon family: a 65-year-old mother called Danusia and her 35-year-old daughter Basia. The two women lived together, isolated from the outside world, in a house kilometers away from the...
NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN
- 07/21/19
During the making of Nothing New Under the Sun, photographer Eva Donckers (b. 1991, Belgium) travelled for one month around the desert of Utah and New Mexico in the United States. This experience allowed her to meet many individuals with fascinating spiritual experiences who lived on the...
CAPUT MUNDI
- 07/17/19
Santolo Felaco (b. 1984, Italy) is a photographer who loves his own country. His latest series, which also became a book, Caput Mundi, is telling a story of the Eternal City of Rome. Every photograph of the project breathes rebellion against the rules of the spiritual and poli...
INFINITE ESSENCE
- 07/11/19
With his project Infinite Essence, tRead More
SORRY, NO VACANCY
- 07/9/19
The beautiful light in the American state of Texas...
MAMA TURN OFF THE LIGHT
- 06/27/19
Petra Katanic (b. 1984) was born and grew up in Serbia. The violence of the Yugoslav Wars was inescapable at the time, and she was also being abused in her own home. The only way out was to disappear inside herself, and to fantasise about a different and more peaceful environment; a place...
HELVETIA
- 06/26/19
Kathrin Mundwiler (b. 1984, Switzerland) started her project Helvetia after having been away from her homeland for years. Now living in the Netherlands, far away from her family and roots, she began looking at Switzerland from a distance. This is when she noticed the typical Swiss hedgeho...
SINKING STONE
- 06/24/19
Photographer Cristiano Volk (1987, Italy) used flash and harsh light, imitating ...
THE PEOPLE OF THE MUD
- 06/17/19
The suggested movements in the photographic work of Luis Alberto Rodriguez...
I DON’T HAVE ROOTS, I AM NOT A TREE
- 06/11/19
Jonas Feige (b. 1988, Germany) has a complex relationship with his home country. His projectRead More
A GREAT LEAP FORWARD
- 06/3/19
Simon Tanner (b. 1983, Switzerland)Read More
MOISSON ROUGE
- 05/27/19
In the work of Marguerite Bornhauser (b. 1989, France), incidentally encountered scenes are combined with carefully constructed compositions in such a way that we can’t know what is real and what is fictitious. Her visual language is one of intense colours, graphic shapes and h...
LIFE GOES ON
- 05/23/19
Polish photographer Jan JurczakRead More
DELTA HILL RIDERS
- 05/6/19
Right after the end of the American Civil War, in 1865, one in four cowboys were African American. However, this Read More
LAND OF IBEJI
- 04/25/19
Land of Ibeji was selected for GUP #60: Escape by Belgian photographer Carl De Keyzer
Yorubaland, a region that falls mainly within south-west Nigeria, is home to a surprising number of twins, a greater proportion than anywhere else in the world. Reactions to this phenomenon range f...
LAY HER DOWN UPON HER BACK
- 04/24/19
It’s unfortunate Read More
SELECTED WORKS BY SERGEY CHILIKOV
- 04/17/19
Despite the strict Soviet rules on how one should behave in public, RussRead More
HOMAGE TO BAUHAUS
- 04/5/19
Growing up in a family of workers in the textile industry in Badalona, Spain,Read More
SPEEDWAY 3460
- 04/3/19
Right after World War II, when veterans with undiagnosed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder were trying to find Read More
BERMUDA TRIANGLE
- 03/27/19
“There is a place that suffocates you when you walk past it, one that has this eerie feeling lingering in the air…” – starts ...
CHICHARRÓN
- 03/25/19
Hiro Tanaka (b. 1955, Japan) started taking photographs by chance. After...
THE BLINDEST MAN
- 03/19/19
In Emily Graham’s (b. United Kingdom) photo...
JOURNEY TO THE INTERIOR
JOURNEY TO THE INTERIOR - 03/11/19
The concept of the American Dream that portrays wealthy, healthy and most importantly, free citizens is no longer valid. One of the first photographers to delude these values and highlight the ubiqui...
F FOR FAKE
- 03/8/19
Subtle humour and a bright flash: that’s how ...
FLOWER ROCK
- 03/7/19
Crimson rivers, verdigris abstract...
HIGHER GROUND
- 03/4/19
With all his large-scale projects, Carl Read More
HIDDEN VICTIMS
- 02/20/19
Kazuma Obara (b. 1985, Japan) has never identified himself with his country, claiming that throughout the history of the world, his motherland has never been the innocent one. The guilt of past actions still haunts many Japanese, and Obara is no exception. However, he is one of t...
OLD FATHER THAMES
- 01/31/19
You may have heard of the famous saying by Heraclitus: “No man ever steps in the same river twice (…)”. However, with her ongoing project Old Father Thames (2018-), London-based photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten (b. 1970, Germany) continuously steps in the waters of t...
THE UNCANNY EVERYDAY
- 01/28/19
Jo Ann Callis (b. 1940, United States) started her experimental photography practice long ago, but without a context you could easily mistake her early colour work for something produced more recently. In fact, the work stems from the 1970s. These images from everyday life contain a certa...
DYCKMAN HAZE
- 01/3/19
In the city parks of New York, nature thrives in the middle of the eternal action of the metropolis. Here, people retreat and relax in anonymity, and it becomes easier to be yourself. It is a haven of tranquillity during daytime, but from dusk till dawn, a different kind of people wander about, a...
WILL MY MANNEQUIN BE HOME WHEN I RETURN
- 12/24/18
Arko Datto (b. 1986, India) considers night as the time when life is at its most sincere and intense, when people are the most truthful. Fort part one of his night-time trilogy, he took the same stroll through his northern Indian neighbourhood every evening, coming across fascina...
AMUSEMENT PARK
- 12/13/18
Whether he shoots for a fashion campaign or for himself, David Brandon Geeting (b. 1989, United States) creates a pseudo-existence in a visual language familiar from glossy magazines. By cleverly placing three-dimensional objects on two-dimensional backgrounds such as found photo...
ROOTS OF THE HEART GROW TOGETHER
- 12/10/18
We usually preserve our memories through photographs, but photography can also serve to discover memories.
Going through the family archive, Valentin Sidorenko (b. 1995, Russia) met members of his family he had never had the occasion to meet beforehand, or whom he had know...
VIRGINS
- 11/19/18
This online portfolio is connected to the theme of GUP #59: Pseudo, where we feature photographic projects that balance between fact and fiction.
Growing up in a small town in Louisiana, Ransom Ashley (b. 1992, United States) experienced the transition from adolescence to...
NEW SONGS
Post title - 11/17/18
The 2016 presidential elections seem to have divided the American population in the hopeful and the scared, with conflicting feelings about the future clashing in both the private and the public sphere. What everyone appears to be agreeing on, however, is the fact that this is a new era for the U...
PAST WITHOUT FUTURE
- 11/14/18
Gerardo Vizmanos’ (b.1975, Spain) photographic production is a rich blend of subjective emotions expressed through movement and static instants frozen in time, a juxtaposition between speed and stillness, close interaction and distance, heat and apathy. Desires, fears, love and...
THIS IS FAREWELL
- 11/6/18
Erik Gustafsson’s (b. 1987, Sweden) This is Farewell is a self-exploratory journey through the past, an autobiographical narrative which aims to deconstruct family bonds and understand how our origins affect how we develop as humans. By returning to his place o...
UNCANNY VALLEY & SISYPHUS
- 10/29/18
We can all look at the past and describe how things have changed, but to determine the meaning of today within its historical context is a rather difficult mission. Kata Geibl (b.1989, Hungary) has always been curious about our relationship with the present; in her most recent p...
BLEU BLANC ROUGE
- 10/24/18
A full member of the world-renowned Magnum agency since 2010, Christopher Anderson (b. 1970, Canada) is active as a documentary photographer while also making very personal work. However many-sided, Anderson’s entire body of work can be considered as one: his journalism is as personal ...
LOVED AN IMAGE
- 10/22/18
In Juliette Blightman’s (b.1980, United Kingdom) body of work, the boundaries between photography, painting, literature and performance seem to constantly blur and overlap. This makes it difficult to define through traditional labels. Her images at first appear to be connected by the pr...
OVER
- 10/19/18
It is surprising how predictable human behaviour can be when seen from a distance. Kacper Kowalski (b. 1977, Poland) first noticed the patterns that occur when man occupies a geographical space while experimenting with aerial photography as he was training as a pilot. After years of captu...
SWALLOW
- 10/15/18
Before dedicating himself to photography, Andras Ladocsi (b. 1992, Hungary) was a professional swimmer. Until the age of 18, Ladocsi spent his day divided by school, the swimming pool and his family. The rigorous routine led him to empathise with those micro communities of people constru...
100 HECTARES OF UNDERSTANDING + NATURE LIKE CAPITAL
- 10/8/18
Even though Jaakko Kahilaniemi (b. 1989, Finland) grew up in a country covered by forests, his attraction toward nature came late. When at the age of 8 he inherited 100 hectares of forested land he reacted with indifference, discounting the importance of such a gift, hardly relatable to ...
NULL HYPOTHESIS
- 10/1/18
In Null Hypothesis, the latest project by Jan Cieslikiewicz (b. 1979, Poland), randomness and ambiguity take center stage among depicitions of everyday events and majestic landscapes. The New York-based photographer collects pictures of the world as he sees it in a very postmodern way, u...
UBUNTU
- 09/26/18
To be connected with everything and everyone: this is the meaning of Ubuntu, a Congolese concept borrowed by photographer Rebecca Fertinel (b. 1991, Romania) to title her latest body of work, which recently won the Dummy Award at Unseen Amsterdam 2018. The series shows a Congolese family...
HUMAN
- 09/17/18
How are people’s lives altered by climate change? Particularly, what are the consequences in one of the now most barren areas of the Middle-East, which in ancient history was one of the most fertile on the planet?
...
BLACK AND WHITE LIFE
- 09/14/18
Photography according to Marcel Kolacek (b. 1983, Czech Republic) has one, simple function: to break time into frozen instants and allow everyday life to be better observed, analysed, understood. Visual storytelling, however, takes much more than just a camera: Kolacek travels to remote ...
HDR_NATURE
Post title - 09/10/18
Perhaps it was moving to a megalopolis from the Japanese countryside that made Yoshinori Mizutani (b. 1987, Japan) view nature’s shapes and colors with new eyes. In HDR_nature, his latest project, leaves, flowers, tree branches and insects interact with wind and sun rays to form patter...
STREET SNAPS
- 09/8/18
Concrete is the backdrop of the most recent project shot by Titia Hahne (b. 1981, The Netherlands), a collection of images shot for Sony that aims to frame the habitat of skateboarders by capturing how they interact with the surrounding environment. The city, with its functional square a...
ZOON
- 09/7/18
Casper was born in 2000. His birth was documented by his father, photographer Koos Breukel (b. 1962, The Netherlands), in portraits both intimate and affectionate. This marked the beginning of a years-long documentation – a registration of a childhood, but also proof of a strong fa...
I’LL DIE FOR YOU
- 08/31/18
I’ll Die for You is an ongoing project by British photographer Laura El-Tantawy (b.1980), born from a personal story. The photographer’s grandfather was a farmer who worked himself to death on his own piece of land in Egypt. Inspired by this, El-Tantaw...
HIM
- 08/30/18
Most nudes we see are female, and when a male body is portrayed, it is still usually done by a male photographer. Clearly, when it comes to nude photography, the male gaze is dominant. Even though a woman’s right to visual pleasure is more and more recognised, we’re still some way from a posi...
SUBTOPIA
Post title - 08/24/18
What kind of connection exists between people and where they live? How are they influenced by places? The work of Adrian Saker reflects on the topic of identity and community and the connection between the two.
During a period of artistic depression, Saker was stimulated by his pa...
CONFINE
- 08/17/18
For Italian photographer Vittoria Gerardi (b. 1996), a stay in the desert landscape of California was both physically and mentally challenging. Death Valley, one of the hottest and driest places on earth, can have an intense effect on a person. Its extremes force one to reach certain lim...
COMMON PEOPLE
- 08/9/18
Even if homosexuality is becoming more and more accepted, unfortunately there are countries where the LGBT community is still oppressed. Photographer Anton Shebetko (b.1990), born in Kyiv and based in Amsterdam, focuses on the things gay people have to endure in homophobic and conservative countr...
You Don’t Look Native to Me
- 08/3/18
Maria Sturm (b. 1985) is close to finalizing her long-term documentation of teenagers from in and around Pembroke, North Carolina, where almost 90 percent of the population identifies as Native American. You Don’t Look Native to Me considers how young people from the Lumbee tr...
TERRAFORM
- 07/30/18
“When we walk along a road, we alternately recognize Images, on our screens, and Landscapes, around us” says Kenta Okamoto (b. 1989, Japan).
Thanks to always looking at our smartphones, a walk through nature is not what it used to be. According to Okamoto, the version ...
SOLITUDE
- 07/25/18
In an age in which we’re all digitally connected, real connections seem to become harder to make. Loneliness is becoming a huge health issue. In his series Solitude, Paul Lukin (b. 1980) offers an emotional and psychological portrait of lives lived alone. The photographs are as black a...
Jiu Valley
- 07/23/18
Jiu Valley in Transylvania is the pride of the Romanian mining industry, or at least it was. Once celebrated as the driving force behind the entire country and strongly industrialised during the forty-year communist regime, today it has gone from 179,000 miners to less than 10,000.
...Females
By Teresa Maria Salvati - 07/12/18
Ornella Mazzola (b. 1984), an Italian photographer from Palermo, Sicily, is an artist who focuses on an intimate and human look. Her series Females is a portrait of women in Mazzola’s family, but it’s also broader than that. What started as a personal diary, ended up being a poetic ye...
Big Papi
- 07/9/18
Gilleam Trapenberg (b. 1991) grew up on the Caribbean island of Curaçao with certain ideals of masculinity, while at the same time being surrounded by strong women. This duality is examined in the ongoing series Big Papi, in which Trapenberg both affirms and debunks the macho st...
CHROMA
- 07/6/18
Life is short, and the world is immense. Most of us have at some point experienced moments of depression, combined with a desire to just leave everything behind, only to remain trapped by the routine of daily life. Marco Argüello (b. 1985) did manage to leave, and he creat...
Money Must be Made
- 07/2/18
The ever-growing Balogun Market has no specific address because it sprawls across Lagos Island in Nigeria. Almost anything can be purchased here, at the second-largest street market in Western Africa. One particular – and ironic – aspect of its expansion is that the market has also swallowed ...
Prodigal Son
- 06/29/18
Prodigal Son is the highly autobiographical title of a series by Vladimir Kolmakov (b. 1986) documentary photographer from St.Petersburg, Russia.
After his parents’ early divorce, Kolmakov grew up with his mother and brother spending his teenage...
Brown Eyes and Sand
- 06/22/18
Paul Hennebelle (b. 1992, France) paints a picture of Beirut that is delicate and fragmented, a portrait of youth in a city in the making. In the context of this chaos, this perpetual construction site, the youth of Beirut is still searching for their own identity. They’re stuc...
Hometowns
- 06/13/18
When we grow up, do we carry traces of our hometown with us? How much do the things we absorb as a child affect us later on? These are the guiding threads of John MacLean‘s photographic journey, a journey thr...
Oyster
- 06/7/18
Children borne of troubled families can carry the unfair burdens of shame and guilt. The fear of this personal history being exposed can estrange, the fear of rejection can cripple; experiencing loss seems to make people fear it more than anything. This is why it can be so empowering for people t...
Searching for Mu
- 05/31/18
The photographic work of Paul Cupido (b. 1972, The Netherlands) revolves around the principle of Mu: a Japanese word that could be translated as ‘does not have’, but is actually open to countless interpretations. Mu can be considered a void, albeit one with potential...
MOONLAND
By GUP team - 05/30/18
The hard land and extreme climate—combined with centuries of isolation—have shaped the people of Ladakh in the Indian Himalayas into a peaceful, tempered existence. It does not pay to give in to one’s passions in these conditions; better to focus on survival and reincarnation. The culture d...
TWILIGHT ZONE
by GUP team - 05/28/18
In the series Twilight Zone, Arnau Blanch (b. 1983) explores the effects of opium in dreams. His images seem to originate from the same corners of the universe where stars are made: galaxies are being born in the swirls of mysterious, cosmic matter; clouds of galactic colours both familia...
Canadian Suburbia
By GUP team - 05/23/18
Very little is natural in the images Kyle Jeffers (b. 1998) shows us: everything here seems artificial and manufactured; the spaces we humans create are far removed from anything seen in the natural world. We paint our world in striking colours of pink, purple, and yellow, which can be f...
AMERICANA
By GUP Team - 05/22/18
French-Russian photographer Anna Hahoutoff (b. 1993) tours the United States to challenge her childhood memories of America; its pop culture and mass consumption, but also its awe-inspiring nature. However, as her ongoing series Americana clearly shows, American wilderness is always expe...
CHARIOTS OF FROLIC
By GUP Team - 05/15/18
Chariots of Frolic is the perfect title for Sameer Raichur’s (b. 1986) endearing series: the festive chariots seen here are fun and endearing. They are ingenious contraptions that have a wonderfully improvised quality to them: based on stock cars that have had their whole rear sections ...
VER DE ACCIÓN
By GUP Team - 05/11/18
Antonio Guerra (b. 1983) challenges our notion of nature, its symbolism, its meaning, and our relationship to it. Through his studies of landscapes, using installations, images within images, and by toying with perspective, he explores how our understanding of nature is produced and repro...
Dead Sea
By GUP Team - 05/7/18
The series Dead Sea by Carlo Lombardi (b. 1988) centres on the endangered Carretta carretta sea turtle, showing us the main human activities that put the species at risk as well as the efforts to protect it in the Mediterranean. It is both a dispassionate and engaging look at one of the ...
TRANSHUMAN
By GUP Team - 04/26/18
What connects transhumanists is the belief that technology can improve the human condition by enhancing human intellect and physiology. Photographer David Vintiner in collaboration with art director Gem Fletcher present us a portrait of this global movement through fas...
ACCLIMATE
By GUP team - 04/23/18
Balint Alovits’ (b. 1987, Hungary) series Acclimate shows us a human settlement in one of the most unforgiving environments we have colonised over human history. It makes you wonder why people over a millennium ago decided to settle in Iceland — and why they still do. Human constructio...
UNA PROVINCIA
By GUP team - 04/18/18
Michele Vittori’s (b. 1980) series Una Provincia shows us a side of Italy we do not often see while at the same time being classically and recognisably Italian. The Fiat 500s and Alfa Romeos are there, but they are rusty and dilapidated. The beautiful landscapes and architecture aren’t...
MARYLAND PARKWAY
By GUP team - 04/17/18
The Las Vegas Strip is famous for tourists, high rollers, flashy neon signs and even flashier hotels and casinos. While the Strip made a quick recovery following the 2008 financial crisis thanks to the money forty million out-of-towners bring to it every year, an alternative reality lays parallel...
FROM SOMEWHERE TO ELSEWHERE
By GUP team - 04/12/18
Life is funny. And unwittingly, normal people do the strangest and funniest things throughout their funny lives. Often, though, it takes a playful, childish eye to recognise that. With adults so inexplicable, the only point of view worth taking is that of a child. This is the point of view Yot...
SEE NAPLES AND DIE
By GUP team - 04/5/18
“If you can smell the street by looking at the photo, it’s a street photograph,” was Bruce Gilden’s response when prompted for a definition of street photography. Sam Gregg’s (b. 1990) series See Naples and Die reeks of the winding alleys and neighbourhood personalities ...
La Nostalgia
By GUP team - 03/26/18
Antonio Privitera’s (b. 1984) images are like snapshots from childhood, where random details merge to become wonderful memories of days at the beach; of parasols and palm trees, of voices drowned out by the sea, of seeing your family in bathing suits. And those days seemed to be dominate...
NEW ARTIFICIALITY
By GUP team - 03/19/18
Catherine Leutenegger (b. 1983, Switzerland) describes herself as a ‘photographic archaeologist’ with a fascination for technological shifts. In her long-term body of work New Artificiality, she investigates through multiple chapters the significant emergence and advancement...
BETWEEN THE LIGHT AND DARKNESS
By GUP team - 03/12/18
In Between the Light and Darkness, Hong Kong photographer YAN Kallen (b. 1981) pays homage to the passion of traditional crafts artisans in Kyoto. Yan photographs the particular and mysterious implements of the artisans, illustrating in a way all the things we cannot begin to ex...
A BORDER WITH A VIEW
By GUP team - 03/9/18
The Yalu and Tumen rivers form a natural border between China and North Korea. In his series A Border with a View, Albert Bonsfills (b. 1982) explores some of the border towns on the Chinese side of the rivers. On the opposite side lies North Korea, shrouded in a cloud of mystery. The co...
BORDERS OF NOTHINGNESS
By GUP team - 03/8/18
In the infinite flow of everything, people come and go in our lives. While the presence of some can be so subtle that we hardly register when it begins or ends, with others it’s far clearer: they enter, or leave, with a bang.
In her delicate and powerful series of black and white images,...
A MICRO ODYSSEY
By GUP team - 02/28/18
Marco Castelli’s (b. 1991) photographs are naïve in the most wonderful of ways. They hark back to a time when space travel was still romantic, when it was about exploring new societies and cultures, when all that was needed for a trip to the moon was a large-enough cannon; space was bot...
SURFACE TENSION
By GUP team - 02/26/18
A great shift is underway in our means of communication. Increasingly, we are using visual, rather than verbal, language. Simultaneously, the imagery that we read is overwhelmingly moving to screens, creating a unified and flat mechanism of conveying information. In her series Surface Tension, Am...
INSIDE TRASLACION
By GUP team - 02/23/18
On January 9th every year, millions of Philippine devotees crowd the streets of Manila in order to catch a glimpse of the Black Nazarene—the life-sized image of a kneeling Jesus Christ carrying the cross—as it is transferred from Quirino Grandstand to its home, Quiapo Church. The most devoted...
IDA
By GUP team - 02/21/18
“I remember vividly the day Ida, my grand-aunt, didn’t remember who I was for the first time,” writes Jošt Franko (b. 1993, Slovenia). At a loss for how to cope with the situation, Franko took a roll of film out of the refrigerator, loaded his Leica and started to take p...
STILL BURNING
By GUP team - 02/14/18
In his latest series Still Burning, American photographer Kevin Cooley responds to the recent La Tuna Canyon Fire, which started September 1, 2017 and went on to burn more than 7,000 acres, making it the largest wildfire in the city of Los Angeles in 50 years. Cooley writes that...
SOUTH WILLIAMSBURG
By GUP team - 02/7/18
In classic street photography style, William Castellana (b. 1968) shows us the orthodox Hasidic Jewish community of New York, and how they conduct their lives out in the streets of Brooklyn. He has lived next door to the group for almost 20 years, but despite this continued proximity, he ...
PLASTIC UTOPIA
By GUP team - 02/6/18
Dutch photographer Henri Blommers creates a false utopia in his series of plastic objects living free amidst nature. Rich in colour, the images are sensual and draw us in with the illusion of health and vitality within the environment. Yet, all too soon, we spy the debris in th...
JUST PASSING THROUGH
By GUP team - 02/2/18
While documenting his travels across America, photographer Samuel Stone (b. 1992) more and more found himself missing out on important events of friends and family back home. By observing his loved ones through text messages, photos and phone calls he felt more lost than ever before. “M...
ROMA HOUSES / NORTHERN NAPLES
By GUP team - 01/29/18
At the outskirts of Naples, Italy, in the neighbourhoods of Scampia and Secondigliano, there are the camps of Via Circumvallazione Esterna and Via Cupa Perillo. One was established in 2000 by municipal decree and one is unauthorized. The camps were intended to be temporary, housing more than a th...
REWOUND
By GUP team - 01/26/18
The renderings of human emotions, often woven into graphic perspectives are the hallmarks of Belgian photographer Klaartje Lambrechts’s (b.1976) work. The series Rewound is based on a quote from Russian novelist Dostoyevsky: “The greatest happiness is to know the source of ...
SELF PORTRAIT
By GUP team - 01/25/18
The self-portraits of English photographer Tom Butler (b. 1979) are nearly unidentifiable. Black shapes pop out of the images, with occasional accents of a white circle or lines – which, upon closer inspection, we can identify as the top of a perfectly bald head or the crook of an elbo...
A GHOST CITY
By GUP team - 01/22/18
With its gleaming gold domes, ostentatious statues, as well as the Guinness Book of Records title for most white marble buildings on earth, Ashgabat (in Turkmenistan), has established itself as a showpiece capital. Spanish photographer Arnau Rovira Vidal (b. 1984) went there for work and ...
LUCINDA’S VALLEY
By GUP team - 01/19/18
Horses, guns, Confederate flags, cowboy hats and boots: in Love Valley, North Carolina, the clichés of the American South are still alive and well. “The town itself is a dirt road off a dirt road,” says American photographer Lila Barth (b.1994), “a small Main Street and a native p...
DON’T MAKE ME LOOK LIKE THE KIDS ON TV
By GUP team - 01/18/18
Ethiopian photographer Dawit N.M.’s (b.1996) was inspired for this series when he took a portrait of his little cousin Fitsum, who jokingly told him, “Don’t make me look like the kids on TV”. Stunned, Dawit tried to portray the real Ethiopia, as he knows it, with friendly people a...
FAMILY FARM
By GUP team - 01/17/18
“Nothing makes me feel more at home than the smell of horse shit,” says Italian photographer Chiara Luxardo (b. 1986). She grew up on a farm near Milan and, as the years went by, found that she increasingly romanticised that nostalgic past. In search of her roots, she came across som...
STILL BELIEVE
By GUP team - 01/10/18
One of the darkest pages of history for Gyumri, a city in Armenia, is the earthquake of 1988. Many of the inhabitants live in terrible conditions and are still struggling to make ends meet. In his series Still Believe, Czech photographer Martin Holík (b. 1985) documented the lives of mo...
THE OTHER PART OF ME
By GUP team - 01/8/18
In this era where the rise of the selfie has superceded the self-portrait, Italian photographer Cristina Coral explores what we allow or do not allow ourselves to be and what we’re willing to show and reveal to the world. In her series The Other Part of Me, we see figures of women merge...
PAIRIDAEZA
By GUP team - 01/5/18
Who would’ve thought the literal meaning of ‘paradise’ is a place surrounded by walls? Derived from the ancient Persian word Pairidaeza (pairi – around, daeza – wall), it must’ve been meant to refer to the idea of a secluded place where luxuriant flora and fa...
RENAISSANCE AND RESILIENCE
By GUP team - 01/3/18
Franco-Tunisian photographer Wahib Chehata (b. 1968) gives ancient baroque and classical themes a modern twist. In this collection of images, we see a selection from two of his recent series, Renaissance and Resilience.
In Renaissance, Chehata creates theatric...
DULCE Y SALADA
By GUP team - 01/2/18
Deep in the arteries of the Magdalena River Estuary System of Colombia, the village of Nueva Venecia is formed of houses raised on stilts, with lives and livelihood tied to water. However, Colombian photographer Jorge Panchoaga (b. 1984) informs us, the water is polluted due to t...
THE UNIVERSE MAKERS
By GUP team - 01/1/18
Oscillating between the factual and the fictional, Italian artist Bianca Salvo’s (b. 1986) work explores the connections between beliefs and the image. For the series The Universe Makers, Salvo collected space imagery and questioned their informative function and authenticity according ...
THE PEOPLE’S SALON
GUP Team - 12/21/17
In her series, The People’s Salon, Tamara Abdul Hadi (b. 1980, United Arab Emirates) celebrates the burgeoning creative talent of hairdressers in Beirut, Palestine, and Gaza. “It is an appreciation of their personal style and their self-expression through self-care an...
THE MOUTH OF KRISHNA
GUP Team - 12/18/17
“In any part of the universe there is a whole universe”, write Spanish photographers Angel Albarrán (b.1969) and Anna P. Cabrera (b.1969), known collectively as Albarrán Cabrera.
The duo tells the story that inspired them, of the god Krishna as a young child: While ...
PARALLEL STATE
GUP Team - 12/18/17
British photographer Guy Martin (b. 1983) interrogates the grey area between documentary and fiction in Turkey in his series Parallel State. Turkish former Prime minister Erdoğan used the term ‘parallel state’ after being convinced that he was being undermined by traitorous media, po...
MEDICINAL PLANT CYCLES
GUP Team - 12/14/17
All around us and within us, cells grow and die, lifeforms are born and reproduce, populations wax and wane. Our universe is comprised of chemical reactions organized in cycles of creation and decomposition.
Australian-Polish artist Renata Buziak (b. 1973) presents these...
TOWER OF THANKS
GUP Team - 12/14/17
Barbara Res, the mother of American photographer Res (b.1985), was the manager of construction on the Trump Tower and Executive Vice President of the Trump Organization for nearly 20 years. Yet, in the run-up to the 2016 elections, she opposed Trump’s campaign and took public stance aga...
KRAFTORT
GUP Team - 12/11/17
Across time, ancient humans have identified certain ‘places of power’, where supposed energies emanate from the Earth and replenish us. But, what are they?
“It is difficult to define these places, and there is also no official definition,” explains German photographer Fran...
DIGITAL DELI
GUP Team - 12/8/17
New York based photographer and/or visual artist Marco Scozzaro (b.1979, Italy) presents a multi-layered body of work in his series Digital Deli, that includes among other things photography, sculptures and video. The series envisions Scozzaro’s interpretation of the contemporary visua...
NEW LIFE SPACE
GUP Team - 12/7/17
Medical hospitals are, by and large, pretty uncomfortable places. Sterile surgical supplies and medical equipment fill up bright and otherwise empty spaces. They’re functional; everything is optimized to prevent people from dying. Chinese photographer Zhang Wei photographs these clinic...
EVERYTHING I WISH I COULD BE
GUP Team - 12/6/17
American photographer Kent Rogowski (b. 1974) is interested in the larger questions of how we and the products surrounding us communicate and deal with moments of pain and change. He therefore created the series Everything I Wish I Could Be, in which he composed and photographed self-hel...
SHINY GHOST
GUP Team - 12/6/17
In her series Shiny Ghost, American photographer Rachel Cox (b.1984) documents the final years of her grandmother’s life as she’s suffering from a degenerative brain disease. The elderly lady is glamorously photographed together with peculiar objects ranging from turtle shells to hai...
THE WU OPERA BEHIND THE STAGE
GUP Team - 12/5/17
Chinese photographer Yu Hua (b.1963) introduces us to actors of the Wu Opera, which plays an important part of the rural residents’ life in the Jinhua area. Wu Opera is a hybrid of six singing styles from different traditional genres in China. This mixture reveals the magic of ancient ...
AND, WHERE DID THE PEACOCKS GO?
GUP Team - 12/4/17
Following a career in journalism and television-production, Japanese photographer Miho Kajioka (b.1973) decided to go back to fine art when a series of terrible events hit japan in 2011: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster caused primarily by a tsunami, following the Tohoku earthquake...
SKIN
GUP Team - 12/1/17
London-based photographer Rosanna Jones (b. 1994) is peeling back the skin. Her mixed media images start with prints of her fashion photographs, which she then rips, cuts, burns and otherwise distresses to break down surfaces and boundaries of identity. She paints and processes t...
DOWN BY THE HUDSON
GUP Team - 11/29/17
In the ongoing project Down by the Hudson, American photographer Caleb Stein (b.1994) shows a record of his walks and interactions along the Main Street of Poughkeepsie, New York, a small city where around twenty percent of the inhabitants live below the poverty line. Although Stein’s ...
SLASH AND BURN
GUP TEAM - 11/28/17
Norwegian photographer Terje Abusdal (b. 1978) operates between fact and fiction in his latest series Slash and Burn, named after the ancient agricultural method of consciously cutting and burning plant-life to create new land. Abusdal focuses on the Finnish farmers i...
HORNLESS HERITAGE
GUP TEAM - 11/24/17
In his series Hornless Heritage, Dortmund-based photographer Nikita Teryoshin (b. 1986, Russian) explores the German dairy industry, which is creating turbo cows: high-performance, milk producing machines. Their horns, which should protect the cows and give them auton...
INTERNAL NOTEBOOK
GUP TEAM - 11/23/17
When Japanese photographer Miki Hasegawa (b. 1973) found out 350 children across her country die annually due to domestic abuse, but only 90 deaths per year are recognized by the Ministry of Health, Education and Welfare, she decided to draw attention to the overlooke...
DISENCHANTMENT
GUP TEAM - 11/20/17
In addition to his work as a natural scientist, Eckart Bartnik (b. 1957, Germany) has devoted himself to photography, which he approaches in the same systematic and analytical way as he examines nature. In his recent series Disenchantment, Bartnik explores the larger ...
BRUTAL LONDON
GUP TEAM - 11/17/17
Italian photographer Alessia Gammarota (b. 1976) illustrates the bigger picture of the housing market of London: the city faces a shortage of affordable homes while increasing numbers of properties in wealthy neighbourhoods are left empty. London, the city of business, is squeezing every s...
MUSEUM OF YOUR MEMORY
GUP TEAM - 11/15/17
German photographer Ulrike Schmitz (b. 1975) combines her enigmatic photography with film stills from Russian propaganda from the Stalinist era in her latest series Museum Deiner Erinnerung (Museum of Your Memory). Her German grandparents lived in a small Ru...
PRIMITIVE ACIDS
GUP TEAM - 11/14/17
Thomas Gosset (b. 1982, France) is not your ordinary photographer, as he recomposes his negatives with acid, ink and paint. Everything is done by hand, from the moment he creates the settings till he develops the prints in the darkroom. In his recent series Primitive ...
PALM WINE COLLECTORS
GUP TEAM - 11/13/17
Ethnographic photographer Kyle Weeks (b. 1992, Namibia) aims to represent the African continent without the inherent power dynamics that voyeuristic photography is known for. Having a South African father and American mother, he describes how he can easily shift betwe...
WILD YOUTH
GUP TEAM - 11/10/17
For the kids who join the archaeological camps scattered around Russia every summer, it’s about more than just bones and dust. It’s about uncovering the mysteries of the past and, most of all, exploring their own inner world. Russian photographer Tanya Borodina (b...
JOHNS
GUP TEAM - 11/10/17
American photographer Josh Johnson (b. 1980) captures the not-so-glamorous spot in life that everyone visits at least once a day: the toilet. We sit down or remain standing, do what’s needed and flush away what’s left behind. This curious fascination sta...
WHITEWASH
GUP TEAM - 11/7/17
Harit Srikhao (b. 1995, Thailand) photographs and creates collages of dark and often grotesque situations that occur during nationalist events in his home country of Thailand.
Through his manipulated and witty images, Srikhao attempts to make people aware of th...
AGAIN
GUP TEAM - 11/6/17
To Hungarian photographer Zsuzsa Darab (b. 1989), photography is all about diving into the depths of her mind. The healing and therapeutic effect of photography was the starting point for her latest series Again. “It’s about the letter you’ve never sen...
ARECIBO
GUP TEAM - 11/3/17
The Arecibo message is an interstellar radio message, broadcast into space in 1974 with the aim of reaching out to extraterrestrial life. The binary message was aimed at the current location of the star cluster M13, some 25,000 light years away, meaning that by the time the ...
FULL SHADE / HALF SUN
GUP TEAM - 11/2/17
Peace, love and paradise: Indian photographer Néha Hirve (b.1992) gives us a glimpse inside the utopia-like Sadhana Forest community in her most recent series Full Shade / Half Sun. This community replants trees to shelter the dried-out ground in India’s dying rain...
AT THE SEA
GUP TEAM - 10/31/17
As the base for her project, Portugese photographer Inês Marinho (b. 1990) references author Milan Kundera’s breakdown of the word nostalgia, where the Greek word “nostos” translates to “the return” and “algos” means “suffering”. The word nostalgia,...
AUTOBIOGRAPHY WITHOUT FACTS
GUP TEAM - 10/30/17
In her mixed-media series Autobiography Without Facts, Belarusian visual artist Masha Svyatogor(b.1989) reflects on the transient state between reality and illusiveness, childhood and adulthood. Based on her experience of being thrown into the real world when growing ...
MUES
GUP TEAM - 10/27/17
French photographer Sylvie Bonnot (b. 1982) originally started in landscape photography due to her passion to wander around in the unpredictability of untamed nature. Her travels around Australia, Japan, Ireland, Norway and Russia are brought together into a photograp...
SER AHI
GUP TEAM - 10/25/17
“In order to capture the essence of nature first I needed to understand and imitate it,” says artist Karla Guerrero (b. 1993, Mexico) about her project Ser Ahi (Spanish for ‘to be there’). In the project Guerrero places herself in and amidst elements of nature...
LADIES ONLY
GUP TEAM - 10/23/17
In her series Ladies Only, Mumbai-based photographer Karen Dias (b. 1987) has observed and documented an unusual sub culture that has formed in the women’s compartments of Mumbai’s local trains. Especially reserved for the female sex, women going to work and young girls going t...
DON’T BE SHY
GUP TEAM - 10/20/17
Kathleen McIntyre’s (b.1962) introspective series Don’t Be Shy forms the unspoken story of her coming of age. In her youth, McIntyre explains, she was the silent observer, lost in her own thoughts. Her talkative family, by contrast, used to tell her, “Don’t be...
SHAN SHUI
GUP TEAM - 10/18/17
Shān Shuǐ, which literally translates to mountain-water, refers to a style of traditional Chinese brush and ink paintings that depict natural landscapes. In their project Shān Shuǐ, S...
SANITÀ
GUP TEAM - 10/16/17
Social documentary photographer Ciro Battiloro (B. 1984, Italy) started his project Sanità after finding a kind of ghetto in the city’s heart of Napoli: Rione Sanità. The pauperization of this neighbourhood was caused by the construction of a bridge arou...
MADE IN ME
GUP TEAM - 10/13/17
He calls it the Camera Oralis: a pinhole camera that allows light in through the orifice of his mouth. With it, Slovenian photographer Uroš Abram (b. 1982) creates black and white images directly on photo paper, marked and marred by imperfections o...
PHOS NOISE
GUP TEAM - 10/11/17
In his series Phos Noise, Max Slobodda (b. 1987) brings to the surface all the unknowns of the universe. Bright objects in loud colours levitate, and fluorescent white dinosaurs and pineapples hover mysteriously.
Slobodda explains the strange human quality of a...
PLASTIC OCEAN
GUP TEAM - 10/10/17
When Dutch photographer Thirza Schaap (b.1971) moved to South Africa, she discovered her findings at the seaside weren’t organic but man-made debris. She went from treasure hunter to trash hunter. For her series Plastic Ocean, in an effort to raise awareness for the...
TRIBE – SOMEWHERE UNDER THE RAINBOW
GUP TEAM - 10/6/17
A space away from consumerism, capitalism and mass media… does this even exist? The Rainbow Gatherings prove there is, at least temporarily, as people congregate in remote settings around the world to live embraced by nature and kindness. The events overflow with the ideal...
E-COMMERCED ANIMALS
GUP TEAM - 10/4/17
In E-commerced Animals, Tomofumi Nakano (b.1978, Japan) shows us how easy it is to have dead animals delivered to your doorstep with the click of a mouse.
In a series of disturbingly bright coloured images, Nakano presents us with various butchered animals – ...
RECONSTRUCTION
GUP TEAM - 10/3/17
In his series Reconstruction, Kosmas Pavlidis (b. 1978, Greece) photographs a world he refers to as a “garden”. Inhabited by bones, an isolated sheepskin, a dusty pheasant, biblical iconography, a lying caryatid, and graves, it is evidently an abando...
NECROFILIA
GUP TEAM - 09/29/17
In his series Necrofilia, Spanish photographer Toni Amengual (b. 1980) has photographed animals in a Barcelona zoo. With the unusual title, the artist cites Erich Fromm’s concept of Necrofilia, which is an idea that the controlled nature of life in modern societ...
LAWS OF SILENCE
GUP TEAM - 09/27/17
In her introspective series Laws of Silence, Jennifer McClure (b. 1971, United States) searched for signs of meaningful relationships and missed opportunities, trying to piece together a map of how to be. “I’ve been afraid of letting go of the life I was programme...
BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH
GUP TEAM - 09/25/17
War lets loose all the destructive forces of mankind against itself. What kind of insanity is this? As Maxim Dondyuk’s (b. 1983) project statement says: “War takes any meaning and breeds emptiness. An emptiness that burns all around leaving just ruins, s...
VILLA ARGENTINA
GUP TEAM - 09/22/17
A woman reclines romantically, surrounded by staged, sumptuous interiors, her body mimicking the oriental beauty in the painting La Grande Odalisque, her face, covered by a big metal pot.
In her intriguing and amusing series Villa Argentina, ...
EPI
GUP TEAM - 09/20/17
Surreal-looking skin landscapes arise, as though skin were appearing before our eyes for the first time. In his digital collages, German photographer Odo Hans ( b. 1976) reveals new ways of seeing, by touching organic surfaces with technical complexity. Thes...
0.65
GUP TEAM - 09/19/17
Shot in the Fribourg mountains, Diane Deschenaux’s (b. 1990, Switzerland) series entitled 0.65, which according to the artist is the typical price of Swiss milk, is a study of Switzerland’s farming industry as it underwent a period of heavy economic strai...
POST-SAUNA PORTRAITS
GUP TEAM - 09/18/17
When it comes to his home country of Finland, Juuso Westerlund (b. 1975) says that the sauna may be one of the biggest clichés around. However, he’s quick to clarify, “It is also the greatest gift to the universe a nation can give.”
The sauna i...
HESITATION
GUP TEAM - 09/15/17
Dutch photographer Margaret Lansink (b. 1961) captures the reservations we have about opening ourselves up to other people and about our relationship with a world in which all moments seem to quickly fade. In her series, Hesitation, Lansink’s analogue photographs of empty rooms...
FINISTERRAE
GUP TEAM - 09/11/17
‘Finisterrae’ means so much as: end of the road. That is more or less how it feels when moving around Southern Portugal or, more precisely, the region that in the ancient Roman era was known as ‘Lusitania’ – which included approximately all of moder...
NEO-ANDINA
GUP TEAM - 09/6/17
In El Alto, the second-most populous city of Bolivia, there has emerged a special kind of event venue. The ornate buildings, colourful and geometric, stand out against the arid landscape and neighbouring red brick buildings. In his series Neo-andina, São Paulo-based photogr...
CYCLE
GUP TEAM - 09/6/17
In the boundaries set up within a home, can a person retain connection with their environment?
Cycle, a project from French photographer Véronique L’Hoste, contemplates this disconnect. Through the series, we follow a pensive form in a white sheet, appre...
STILL DIETS
GUP TEAM - 09/6/17
In his series Still Diets, Italian photographer Dan Bannino...
SPACESHIPS
GUP TEAM - 08/31/17
Have aliens invaded? Are we being shown evidence of futuristic spaceships?
Not exactly. In his series Spaceships, photographer Lars Stieger offers us a view of architectural spaces at strange angles and in isolated settings. Shown in this way, these m...
A CLIMATE FOR CONFLICT
GUP TEAM - 08/30/17
Climate change and environmental degradation are transforming Somalia, pushing people to desperate choices and violence. Somalis live – and die – depending on the amount of rain that falls each year.
Nairobi-based photographer Nichole Sobecki (b. ...
SHOOT THE ARROW
GUP TEAM - 08/28/17
Fascinated by the larger-than-life burlesque dancer, The World Famous *BOB*, New York-based photographer Amy Touchette immersed herself into *BOB*’s world for four years. The resulting series, Shoot the Arrow, is a documentary work on her electric life, seen in grai...
ON PLEASURE GROUNDS
GUP TEAM - 08/25/17
Photographer Clemens Ascher (b.1983, Austria) has created a strange and slightly sinister amusement park, satirically naming the series On Pleasure Grounds. It is a fictional world where the people, guzzling synthetically coloured drinks and scarfing down junk food seem to be the spectacle...
FLORENTINE
GUP TEAM - 08/22/17
With hand-sewn costumes and elaborate sets, Helena Blomqvist (b. 1975, Sweden) creates a fantasty world starring Florentine, a former ballerina from the 19th century. Florentine, now an aged ballerina with withered skin and grey hair, takes centre stage of ...
MY MUSE
GUP TEAM - 08/21/17
The relationship between artist and muse is one based on mutual interest and curiosity; they share a symbiotic dependence. My Muse, a series of portraits by Jouk Oosterhof featuring her muse and former neighbor Andre, illustrates this; their coexistence form...
FAULT LINE
GUP TEAM - 08/18/17
In her series Fault Line, New York-based photographer Sophie Barbasch captures her family in their shared experience of estrangement and divide. She metaphorizes this with a fault line, the geological splitting of the earth during an earthquake.
The s...
BLEU GLACÉ
GUP TEAM - 08/17/17
Bleu Glacé, as described by Paris-based artist Manon Lanjouère (b. 1993) is “a ‘scientific’ study that synthetically reconstructs the Icelandic landscape.” Lanjouère studies the volatile Nordic island to inform colour, texture and mood, to design ...
DIALOGUES OF AN INTROVERT
GUP TEAM - 08/16/17
In his series, Dialogues of an Introvert, Indian photographer Sameer Tawde (b. 1978) photographs and creates montages of everyday objects in defamiliarizing ways, drawing our attention to the separation, and sometimes alienation, between the self and the outside world. For exampl...
TEARS AND SAINTS
GUP TEAM - 08/14/17
“If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago,” wrote Emil Cioran in his book Tears and Saints in 1938. “But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.” In his eponymous series, Greek photographer Ge...
CUTTING THROUGH THE CHAOS OF TOKYO
GUP TEAM - 08/14/17
As Nikon celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, Polish photographer Lukasz Palka captured the essence of Tokyo – the world’s biggest city and birthplace of Nikon – by cutting through the chaos to focus on the elements that make the city so special...
PERMANENT ERROR
GUP TEAM - 08/11/17
Pieter Hugo (b. 1976, South Africa) photographed the people and landscape of an extensive dump of obsolete technology in Ghana. Western countries produce around 50 million tons of digital waste every year – most of which is piled in containers and ship...
ZUKUNFT
GUP TEAM - 08/9/17
German-born, Argentina-based photographer Sarah Pabst’s (b. 1984) series Zukunft (German for future) centres around postmemory. In this experience, the second-generation survivors of a personal or cultural trauma ‘remember’ an event, by means of the st...
CATCH
GUP TEAM - 08/8/17
In 2015 and 2016, Belgium-based photographer Kevin Faingnaert captured the strange and obscure world of wrestling in Europe. His series, Catch, shows the wrestlers from across Europe and the UK, after they’ve put on their costumes and slipped into their al...
LAMENT
GUP TEAM - 08/7/17
In his series Lament, American photographer John Steck Jr. (b. 1980) draws our attention to the materiality of photography and the memories captured and lost through this quality. By manipulating the image-making process of particular photographs, Steck expo...
INPUT OUTPUT
GUP TEAM - 08/5/17
Stefan Friedli (Switzerland) and Ulrik Martin Larsen (Denmark), better known as the interdisciplinary artist collective PUTPUT, explore the banality of objects and playfully turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. Through ...
THE RUG’S TOPOGRAPHY
GUP TEAM - 08/2/17
The Rug’s Topography is a project that began with Rana Young (b.1983, USA) photographing her partner of six years. Young describes how, over time, they began facing an internal conflict, which pitted their individual identities against their roles in the r...
HERE, DEATH WILL COME TOMORROW
GUP TEAM - 07/31/17
Rome, a city rich with religious and political history, has become increasingly known as a city of clichés and icons. Yet, from its party goers to nuns and everyone else in between, the city is most definitely not uniform.
In his series Here, Death Will Come Tomorrow...
DOMESTIC ANAMNESIS
GUP TEAM - 07/28/17
In his series, Domestic Anamnesis, French photographer Adrien Blondel (b. 1986) approaches the inside of bedrooms from a new angle. Domestic Anamnesis provides a lens through which to see how memories remain alive, in the present, rather than being thoughts ...
KOAN
GUP TEAM - 07/27/17
A koan is a learning construct in Zen Buddhism: it is a story, dialogue, question or statement used to provoke meditation in students, and illustrate the inadequacy of reasoning.
In her series Koan, Xiaoyi Chen (b. 1992, China) desires to achieve this...
EDIFICE
GUP TEAM - 07/26/17
Edifice is a visual journey back to a time most people would like to forget. Polish photographer Karol Palka (b. 1991) documents buildings that survived the Communist regime. The photographs show the interiors of the Polana Hotel, a closed holiday fac...
HOMELAND DELIRIUM
GUP TEAM - 07/24/17
In the spring of 2013 Istanbul’s Gezi Park was facing destruction plans which prompted protesters to occupy the park. Emine Gozde Sevim (b. 1985), currently based in New York but originally from Istanbul, was visiting her hometown to see family when the pa...
MALANKA
GUP TEAM - 07/19/17
Ukrainian photographer Serhiy Morgunov (b. 1986) documents Malanka in his series of the same name. Malanka is a holiday where villagers in Ukraine put on gypsy, goat, nurse, hunter and devil costumes and parade from house to house while singing carols. Accor...
NUMEN
GUP TEAM - 07/18/17
In his series, Numen, Spanish photographer Jon Cazenave (b. 1978) photographs the land, animals, and people in Spain to create an eerie narrative journey that explores the roots of humanity back into nature. As the photographer himself puts it, “the animal...
SOLUTION
GUP TEAM - 07/17/17
In her series Solution, Russian photographer Polina Washington (b. 1992) explores the intricate beauty in everyday objects and parts of nature. From broken mirrors to flat tires to trees and sand, Washington highlights the beauty in things we usually think of as munda...
MIMESIS
GUP TEAM - 07/14/17
In Mimesis, a new series from Canada-based, German-born photographer Birthe Piontek, self-exploration is the central focus. Piontek creates a fictional world of representation that mediates our relationship to reality and the way we encounter images of ourselves and o...
RECALL
GUP TEAM - 07/13/17
British-born and Japan-based photographer Jacob Burge (b. 1981) explores the collision of nature and man-made objects in his series of photo-collages, entitled Recall. In his images, Burge brings together different manmade objects such as cars and computers with piece...
SABRA
GUP TEAM - 07/12/17
Israeli photographer Oded Balilty (b.1979) highlights the dualistic aspects of the sabra (Hebrew for cactus) in his series of the same name. The sabra plant symbolizes the idea of the land as it used to be. But in the photographer’s own words, “Th...
UNBORN CITIES
GUP TEAM - 07/11/17
In his series, Unborn Cities, American photographer Kai Caemmerer (b. 1988) explores the architectural structures and physical growth of new cities in inner-mainland China. Photographing newly-built residential buildings during the day and night, Caemmerer gives us a glimpse into...
IN THE ROOM
GUP TEAM - 07/7/17
Italian photographer Francesca Cesari (b. 1970) brings us into the intimate space of a mother lulling her child to sleep with breastmilk. Despite this gentle act being everyday and universal, it still is often considered to be private, taking place only behi...
PYRÈNE
GUP TEAM - 07/5/17
In his series Pyrène, French photographer Léo Delafontaine (b. 1984) captures the serenity of the Bagnères-de-Bigorre, a thermal station in the French Pyrenees. By including landscape photographs of sunsets and haze-covered mountaintops, Delafontaine high...
STOCKHOLM SYNDROME
GUP TEAM - 07/4/17
For the past 4 years, Natalia Podgorska (Poland) has been working as a product photographer for a builders merchant. It is purely a functional (mind-numbing) office job that helps her to pay the bills. However, what began as a feeling of being a ‘hostage...
A CIRCLE OF BLUEBIRDS
GUP TEAM - 07/3/17
When we convert the Earth’s electromagnetic spectrum into soundwaves, we hear a movement of energy. As charged solar particles hit the radioactive belts surrounding our planet, they get trapped and whirled about… it’s a chirping that sounds like birds.
Montréal...
WILD AT HEART
GUP TEAM - 06/30/17
British photographer Beccy Strong’s portfolio Wild at Heart centres around the complexity of time and the restraints it puts on us. Between laughter and wandering eyes and between bodies of water and moss covered trees, Wild at Heart draws our attention to growth, m...
MULTIVERSE
GUP TEAM - 06/29/17
In her series Multiverse, Elizabeth Rovit (b. Greece, 1989) explores the theory of multiple universes by uncovering personal happenings in her life and the connections that follow.
The images represent diverse moments from Rovit’s existence, whe...
CLOSE
GUP TEAM - 06/27/17
Dualities lie at the heart of Swedish photographer Pernilla Zetterman’s (b. 1970) series Close. The series reflects Zetterman’s own memories, both beautiful and painful, of her experiences with equestrian culture and its associated cultural codes.
...
YOUNG BRITISH NATURALISTS
GUP TEAM - 06/23/17
In her series, Young British Naturists, London-based photographer Laura Pannack highlights the beauty of nakedness – both of the body and of the natural world. She photographs young adults together and in solitude eating, laughing, smoking, playing games, and relaxi...
EL FONDO DE LA SOMBRA
GUP TEAM - 06/21/17
Mysticism lies at the heart of Mexican photographer Dolores Medel’s (b. 1982) series El Fondo De La Sombra (Spanish for the bottom of the shadow). Through her photographs she shares pieces of her family’s contradictory and complex history. Medel photographed in Los Tux...
GRINDERS
GUP TEAM - 06/19/17
In small, rural towns of the United States, bodyhackers are working to merge man and machine. Experimenting in home-grown labs that resemble cluttered garages and chaotic dens, they build devices to implant into their own bodies, becoming the guinea pigs of a transhuman future.
In his seri...
TRIGGER TRASH
GUP TEAM - 06/16/17
Trigger Trash, a term coined by the American Bureau of Land Management (BLM), refers to any items left behind as a result of target shooting. In this series, Daniel George (b. 1984, USA) photographs such artefacts as he reflects on the many issues that face.
Target shootin...
ONLY CHILD
GUP TEAM - 06/14/17
Pain and coming to terms with the past are the hallmarks of American photographer K.K. DePaul’s series Only Child. Based on her own complex relationship with her father, Only Child is comprised of collage style images based around portraits of a sombre you...
GRASS, PEONIE, BUM
GUP TEAM - 06/12/17
Maisie Cousins (1992, UK) creates work that is undeniably uncensored. That is, she has found an application of photography that makes her subjects overly visible. It is what could be filed under art of the ‘ridiculous sublime’: as something that is funny and uncan...
JESSICA THALMANN
GUP TEAM - 06/12/17
Jessica Thalmann (b. 1988, Canada) seeks to unravel the conventional relationship we have with photographic imagery and their material implications. Working with both her own images and archival materials, she prints, cuts, assembles and folds photographs in...
UNSPOKEN CONVERSATIONS
GUP TEAM - 06/9/17
In Unspoken Conversations, Rania Matar (b. 1964) explores womanhood from the perspective of two important stages of life: adolescence and middle age. More specifically, she photographs mothers and daughters in quiet moments of shared company. The glances and...
GODS AND MEN
GUP TEAM - 06/8/17
Told throughout time are the stories of ordinary men and women who transcend their mortality to become myths, icons, legends – gods who walk the earth. But what is it that elevates one individual above the rest? How does a human of flesh and blood transform into an idea?...
TRACES & SILENCES
GUP TEAM - 06/7/17
In his recent series Traces & Silences, American photographer Andy Egelhoff (b. 1989) captures the heart of the dance music network around the world. Egelhoff took documentary photographs at after-parties, artists’ creative spaces and DIY venues in twelve countrie...
EXPOSURE
GUP TEAM - 06/2/17
Exposure is a term that commonly refers to perceptibility and vulnerability. Through his use of black and white film, Kazuma Obara (b. 1985, Japan) makes a double entendre of the word that challenges our perception of this terminology as he portrays the life...
GROUP CHAT
GUP TEAM - 05/31/17
What does it mean to be a young woman today? In her series Group Chat, American photographer Gabby Jones (b. 1994) begins to broach this salient question. As Jones explains, “Group Chat proudly displays the beautiful complexity of what it means to be a you...
KHRUSHCHEVKA
GUP TEAM - 05/29/17
Germany-based photographer Snezhana von Büdingen (b. 1983, Russia) pairs images of Soviet appartment buildings with portraits of their inhabitants. Named after the then first secretary of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchevkas are buildings that...
AJNA
GUP TEAM - 05/26/17
Self-exploration and expression lie at the heart of Bangladeshi photographer Shadman Shahid’s series Ajna. The word ajna, Shahid explains to us, in Sanskrit means “the eye that one uses to see the immaterial”. The title is emblematic of Shahid...
RETURN
GUP TEAM - 05/24/17
In her series Return, Norwegian photographer Andrea Gjestvang (b. 1981) captures the experiences young asylum seekers face following
... NEST (MEMORY)
GUP TEAM - 05/23/17
American artist M. Apparition experiments with paper and processes in her series Nest (Memory), a range of images that depict memories – both warm and painful.
Apparition works with chromogenic paper, stripping down the surfaces to reveal some of th...
THE MEMORY OF C
GUP TEAM - 05/19/17
Chinese photographer Zhou Pinglang (b. 1988) captures a city and its inhabitants on the verge of an uncertain future. Shuangyashan, meaning Double Duck Mountain, is a city in Northeast China which used to be a prosperous mining city. “One black face fe...
A PERSONAL COLLECTION
GUP TEAM - 05/16/17
At the age of 18, David Uzochukwu (b.1998, Austria) has established his portfolio with a mix of editorial, commercial and personal work. Most recently, the Brussels-based photographer worked closely with the musician Benjamin Clementine.
Regardless of...
MANHATTAN SUNDAY
GUP TEAM - 05/12/17
American photographer Richard Renaldi (b. 1968) revels in the afterglow of New York nightlife in his body of work Manhattan Sunday. Situated somewhere between dusk and dawn, the scenes celebrate the joie de vivre in the city that never sleeps.Renaldi mo...POLIO
GUP TEAM - 05/10/17
Polio refers to the cruel disease of poliomyelitis and in this series, Ehtiram Jabi (b. Azerbaijan) tackles his own experience with the illness in a range of images that reflects on this period in his life.After his second birthday, Jabi’s life took a signific...“LOSING” AMOS
GUP TEAM - 05/9/17
In his series “Losing” Amos, 19 year old Nigerian photographer Adeolu Osibodu pays homage to his recently deceased grandfather in a series of self-portraits, in which he poses in his grandfather’s attire amidst the landscape.
The series is comprised of three shots each of four...
MANILA GOTHIC
GUP TEAM - 05/6/17
In his series Manila Gothic, Filipino artist Lawrence Sumulong (b. 1987) presents an interpretative documentation of the current state of Philippine President Duterte’s war on drugs and the trauma left in its wake. While the war has been brutal, Sumulong s...
THE BURNING PLAIN
GUP TEAM - 05/3/17
The Phlegraean Fields, west of Naples in Italy, are defined by their relationship to volcanic threat. Comprised of a 13 kilometer-wide cauldron-like depression with 24 craters, the fields have constant eruptive activity of gas or mud, with earthquakes and bradyseisms. Phl...
METAMORPHOSIS
GUP TEAM - 05/1/17
Maria Pleshkova (b. 1986, Russia) faces her own personal growth in this series of black and white self-portraits, Metamorphosis. While some animals experience clear and visible transformations, like a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, as humans we experience metamorphoses...
SOLASTALGIA
GUP TEAM - 04/27/17
During his studies in London, Shi Yangkun (b. 1991) visited his hometown in Shangshui county in China to find that urbanisation, in only a short period of time, had changed the place tremendously. He started to feel homesick for the town he used to know, and also real...
ADVAITA
GUP TEAM - 04/25/17
In Hinduism, advaita is the feeling of oneness with the creation of life itself. It is the heightened sense of awareness in which one sees everything in oneself and as oneself. Petros Koublis (b. 1981, Greece) explores this transparency of being in a ...
BURIED REFLECTIONS IN THE SILO
GUP TEAM - 04/24/17
Igor Posner, Devin Yalkin, Samuele Pellecchia, and Francesco Merlini are all members of Prospekt, an agency based in Italy for which they all individually establish projects that are documentary in style and...
THE GLEANERS
GUP TEAM - 04/19/17
In his series The Gleaners, American photographer Matt Hamon documents a small group of primitive skills practitioners who attend the annual buffalo hunt on the perimeter of Yellowstone National Park in Montana.
Hamon’s images capture the process in...
THE ISLE OF WIGHT ANALOGY
GUP TEAM - 04/12/17
London-based photographer Derek Man (b. Hong Kong) explores his adopted country of the UK, specifically the Isle of Wight, with his images questioning the appreciation of home and cultural identity.
Anthropologist Judith Okely notes: “The Isle of Wight, thoug...
DABU
GUP TEAM - 04/10/17
The Mosuo, often referred to as Dabu, are a Chinese ethnic minority of around 40,000 people that enjoyed hundreds of years of relative stability in a complex matriarchal structure that values female power and decision-making. The Berlin-based photographer Karolin Kl...
DEVILS
GUP TEAM - 04/7/17
Highly secretive and shrouded in mystery, pagan communities continue to exist at the fringes of dominant Christian religious practice in Liberia. British photographer Conor Beary (b. 1989) shows a glimpse of these hidden collectives in his new series Devils. The ‘de...
NAGAR
GUP TEAM - 04/5/17
In her series Nagar, Anu Kumar (b. 1990, India) returns to her hometown of Kavi Nagar, Ghaziabad and connects with her Indian heritage and identity in the process.
Although Kumar visited Kavi Nagar throughout her childhood, her most recent trip was remarkably d...
LETHE
GUP TEAM - 04/3/17
In her series Lethe, the Polish-born photographer Sylwia Kowalczyk presents a collection of fragmented collages depicting how the loss of memories brings its own grief. According to Greek mythology, ‘Lethe’ refers to the river that rids memories of the dead as th...
COMING INTO FOCUS
GUP TEAM - 03/28/17
In her latest series Coming into Focus, Ellen Jantzen (b. 1964, USA) brings different environmental surroundings into focus and explores the relationship between one’s consciousness and the change in thinking that results through relocating.
...
VIEW FINDER
GUP TEAM - 03/27/17
In View Finder, a 2017 series of images from British artist Helen Sear (b. 1955), we see bales of hay in the field rendered as flat geometry. Distinctly rural, yet orderly in their circular precision, the images are calm black and white meditations on nature...
WITH WHOM DO I HAVE THE PLEASURE?
GUP TEAM - 03/24/17
Photography is a visual study – it depends on what we have the power to see. So, in what way can a photographer consider an inability to see?
For Charlie Simokaitis (b. 1967, USA), this is not merely an academic question. When his daughter went blin...
THIS IS NOT A TOWER
GUP TEAM - 03/21/17
In his series This Is Not a Tower, Denis Esakov (b. 1984, Kyrgyzstan) presents a collection of black and white architectural photographs of Soviet towers, portraying their downward shift of esteem. He describes the shift of these towers from “a dominant presence in ...
BLACK DOG PHOTOGRAPHY
GUP TEAM - 03/17/17
In his Black Dog Photography, Dutch photographer Maarten Kools (b. 1970) presents a high contrast stream of consciousness. Forming from the artist’s personal reaction to the death of a close friend, the series of images looks at the world through a conflic...
THE LONELY MAN
GUP TEAM - 03/15/17
Nicky Hamilton (b. 1982, UK) presents the series The Lonely Man – a slow and meticulous personal project, in which each photo took around three months to produce.
Hamilton has always been a very visual man – a talent he says he has accumulated through his c...
CHARLIE SURFS ON LOTUS FLOWERS
GUP TEAM - 03/13/17
Almost 40 years after the devastating war in Vietnam, society there has changed its hopes and dreams. A new generation of Vietnamese has set out to create high-paced economic growth. Curiously, this new capitalist spirit develops under the strict rule of the communist party....
DROPS
GUP TEAM - 03/8/17
In Drops, Christelle Boulé visualises the ineffable experience of smelling a perfume. Boulé developed a process that captures the image of a fragrance by placing a few drops of perfume on colour photographic paper. After drying, the paper is exposed to light and put into developer soluti...
IN MEMORY OF A MONOLITH
GUP TEAM - 03/7/17
In Lanzarote, between 1730 and 1736, the eruptions of Timanfaya destroyed fertile land and 26 villages. The subsequent loss of 11 villages eventually forced the majority of the population to leave the island; yet remarkably, the human race still manages to overcome and survi...
UNTITLED
GUP TEAM - 03/3/17
“I can be anything I like but first I have to know what I have been and what I am” (Lucy R. Lippard)
Untitled, a new series by Ariane Johnston Breen, revolves around notions of transformation, self-realisation and mortality. By using the sy...
STANDING ROCK
GUP TEAM - 02/28/17
In the middle of intense, yet peaceful protests between the Native Americans, the U.S. government and Energy Transfer Partners, photographer J.R. Mankoff (b. 1981, USA) visited North Dakota to learn more about the pipeline threatening the drinking water of Lakota.
The Lakota prophec...
THE RIVERBED
GUP TEAM - 02/27/17
Focusing on the architecture and habitats of counter-cultural communities, the London-based photographer, Ben Murphy, presents his latest exhibition series, The Riverbed. The collection display shows Murphy’s ten-year encounter in the remote mountainou...
MIRRORS OF OURSELVES
GUP TEAM - 02/24/17
“We find duality, the mirror of ourselves, where all of the lower is in the higher, horizontal expansion, vertical emergence, it seems to be a dream, an illusion.” – Jose Espinola
Jose Espinola (b. Mexico, 1984) pays tribute to the Mexican he...
SELF-UNTITLED
GUP TEAM - 02/22/17
In Self-Untitled, Samantha Geballe (b. 1988, USA) pulls us in close. Focused on her physicality, the project of self-portraits shows a period of three years marked by dramatic change, alternating between a state of obesity and a body half its original size.<...
THOSE WHO EAT FISH FROM THE CYANIDE LAKE IMPROVE THEIR SEX LIFE
GUP TEAM - 02/21/17
In his series ‘Those who eat fish from the cyanide lake improve their sex life’, Tomas Bachot (b. 1989, Belgium) presents us with a personal account of his time in Romania. Bachot’s images act as somewhat of a mirror – each one represents a diffe...
AMOR SUI
GUP TEAM - 02/17/17
Amor Sui (Latin for ‘self-love’), an ongoing portrait project by Irvin Rivera, explores one extreme form of self-love by asking subjects to make love with their own mirror image. The idea followed from a random conversation that Rivera had, which led to the questi...
IN THE EXODUS, I LOVE YOU MORE
GUP TEAM - 02/15/17
In her series, In the Exodus, I Love You More, Hoda Afshar (b. 1983) records her changing vision of, and relationship to, the country of her birth, Iran: a relationship that has been shaped by her moving to Australia. The images explore the interplay of presence and a...