By recontextualizing open-access images in a collage combined with his own photos, Alnis Stakle seeks to offer a decolonial perspective on past events in his collage series The Flow of Things.
While Stakle re-examines our visual history through collages, Sveta Kaverina’s mockumentary project, The Three of Us, explores a more specific, forgotten part of Soviet-era history: the quest for immortality. It envisions a failed revival experiment that produces three cloned young women, who symbolize the artist's divided heritage and the unresolved remnants of a bygone political system.
In his series Where Fireflies Unfold, Oskar Alvarado delves into his personal history and memories to reflect on identity and the essence of his ancestral community Deleitosa, a small village in Spain that was the subject of an iconic photo essay by Eugene Smith in the 1950s.
Moving from a reinterpretation of a past community to the emotional reality of an evolving one, Michelle Loukidisexplores the emotional journey of a single mother of three sons, documenting the period of transition as their close family bond begins to loosen and they venture into the world, in her portrait series, My Sons' Mother.
Inspired by the painting Blue Boy (1770) by Thomas Gainsborough, that has been described as a “powerful symbol of non-conformist gender identity” in art history, Michael James O’Brien portrays young men from a queer perspective in this series Blue Boy.
Tina Sturzenegger and Iryna Kabysh both draw attention to our ways of consumption. In her exaggerated and humorous photo series Superhigh, Sturzenegger critiques society’s obsession with food purity and beauty ideals, while Kabysh, using playful imagery and sharp words in her statement, exposes the hypocrisy of the modern world in her “second rate manifesto” Hypocrisy.
Noemi Sparago’s Get Equipped is an archival photo series of water pistols shot as a neutral, scientific typology. Her work explores the fine line between play and violence, showing how these harmless toys still possess the visual language of a real threat.
The persistent threat of drug trafficking and violence to coastal communities in Colombia is explored in Santiago Escobar-Jaramillo’s photo essay The Fish Dies By Its Mouth. The photographer shows how people's daily lives are intertwined with the illicit drug trade, exploring their resilience through participatory photography.
Amidst the severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Amer Nasser documents the remarkable human spirit, capturing people's ingenious methods for continuing on in the face of widespread destruction. His project Gaza. A Signal of Life is a search for signs of existence and a powerful statement of hope amidst the devastation.
This a reminder of the state of the world.
We hope you find inspiration in the works in this issue.
