Art
Arles: Discovery Award
August 2007: in review
One of our favourite things about Arles is the promotion of new talent, the pinnacle of which is the Discovery award. Five individuals, established names in the photographic community, nominate three lesser-known photographers and curate exhibitions of their work for the fair. From these fifteen exhibitions, one individual is awarded 25,000 euros, on the basis that their work deserves international recognition.
In part five of our Arles coverage, we take in the nominees of Johan Sjostrom, Curator at the BildMuseet in Umea, Sweden. He chose three photographers, each with a very different approach to the discipline. Read about the three below, and click on the images to see a selection of photographs from their exhibitions.
Between the years of 2004-2006, Finnish photographer Nanna Hanninen experimented taking long exposure shots of cityscapes, containing a mixture of light sources for her series titled 'The New Landscapes'. 'These special urban landscape shots show my body movements reproduced on the photographic material, reproduced as rhythmical light lines where the subject and scenery melt into one image,' explains Hanninen, 'the abstract and pictorial surfaces refer to the human presence and to the photography as a medium that, in my work, is moving closer to painting.'
In complete contrast to Hanninen's carefully honed technique, the Chinese photographer Qiu has a far more haphazard approach, 'I still don't know what photography is, I just obstinately keep holding a snap camera and shoot muddleheadedly.' For a seemingly random approach, Qiuï's results are filmic and graceful in composition and there's an overwhelming air of nostalgia in the grainy monochromatic prints, explained perhaps by Qiu's own inspiration: 'Loneliness and fear wake me in tears - I'm filled with fear of losing everything.'
The Peruvian photographer, Trinidad Carrillo's vision is firmly rooted in everyday surrounds, but imbued with flickers of surreality. Her knack is in capturing ordinary moments in reality that, when removed from their context and seen as a photograph, suddenly become very extraordinary: the Peruvian boy cupping a torch in his hands appears to be playing with fire and the baby girl asleep on a black jumper seems to have a full head of long, black hair. Carrillo's vision is to catch the things that elude our eyes with her photographs, replacing the 'normal vision', which she finds inadequate, with the vision she finds through her lens instead.
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