Outdoor exhibitions

© Joana P Cardozo (US) “Blueprints, our home is the reflection of ourselves”

A silent piano, high heels in the walking-in closet, faded dead flowers still releasing a sweet smell, toys fighting each other in the basement, incense, lace and Saints. Blueprints gravitate towards the notion that our home is the reflection of ourselves. Instead of conventional photographic portraiture, I reveal the personalities of my subjects by depicting shadows of the contents of their homes. The final images resemble architectural floor plans; however, Blueprints are in fact an unusual form of portrait. While these portraits do not depict my subject’s faces, hands, or likenesses, they are a reflection of each person, a reverse projection, a negative of the original. It is like reading their biography, but from the outside in.

Joana P. Cardozo is a Brazilian-born visual artist based in New York City. Her creative practice utilizes photography to produce images that engage her subjects and their home environments in a unique graphic style of portraiture titled Blueprints. Cardozo graduated from the International Center of Photography in 2015. Her work has been exhibited in shows including Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn; International Center of Photography, New York; Photoville, Brooklyn; Filter Space, Chicago; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn and Paraty em Foco International Photography Festival, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is a 2017 Critical Mass Finalist and was awarded first place at Paraty em Foco 12th International Photography Festival, Paraty, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2016.

© Robert Dash (US) “Micro climate change”

As we humans are busy going about our lives, nature is in shock from the choices that we make. This series is about how nature responds to climate change on a micro scale. The images promote the exquisite detail, mystery, vulnerability and power of nature. For example, diatoms and plants make most of the oxygen on Earth. Warmer oceans make it harder for diatoms to make oxygen. Plants take CO2 from our out-breaths and release oxygen and water in return. All of this exchange moves through stomata. As temperatures rise, these cells close, accelerating the death of trees, especially in the tropics. Images of stomata are sequenced alternately, and then randomly, to suggest a breaking of patterns and balance with the chaos of climate change. Each image was made with a scanning electron microscope, and features natural objects scaled at several times smaller than a pinhead. Most of the images are photomontages with DSLR macro photography, to allow a surreal conversation between everyday leaves, seeds or feathers, and minute details of themselves.

Robert Dash is an educator, naturalist and photographer whose work features the complex textures and patterns of micro nature. His photographs have been published by National Geographic, TIME, and Lenswork. They have appeared in galleries and juried shows in the US and China, Canada and Brazil and Lithuania. He was shortlisted for the Visura/UPI Grant for Storytelling On Climate Change, 2018. During 2017 and 2018, five of his images were part of the international outdoor exhibition The FENCE. In 2017, Dash published his first book, On An Acre Shy of Eternity, Micro Landscapes at the Edge, which won the Nautilus Book Awards Gold for Photography and Arts, and Best of Self Published. His book was also a finalist in the Foreword Reviews Indie Book Awards for Photography. In 2016 he presented the widely-viewed TEDx lecture, “The Intercourse of Nature”.

Undoubtedly, there is a fundamental human urge to survive. Often that involves changing places. So, I wondered: Is there a parallel world to the human-centric world we have created where migration takes place as a matter of course? Does that primeval urge residing in wild minds help us to see the more complex human motivation to move in a different way? I have known the land called Mara for a long period of time during which I have grown to love it and to feel for its wild animals. Here, wild animals routinely migrate in search of water and food. First, influenced by Cartier - Bresson and Avedon, I simply set down in photographs what I felt about this movement. Using a close, intimate point of view as well as a consistent format, I waited and waited for the key moments. Then I determined to frame my response as a visual series hoping to show motion in survival. This risky body of work, which had heavy investment and three years of commitment to get it right, is a visual attempt at migration in a wild habitat inviting us to re-examine, even revise, our own urges to move to pastures anew.

Anup received the National Geographic call that most photographers dream of for his first assignment for the magazine in 2001. This was followed by seven more assignments and then publication of three photography driven books for the New York art publisher, Abrams. By now Anup had got fascinated by Fine Art photography and wondered if he could hit the sweet spot between documentary and fine art photography. The journey began with the publication of three photography driven books by the New York art publisher, Abrams. His latest project, published in book form, The Mara, is an attempt to have the viewer feel what it is like to feel intimate with wild animals and thereby feel a primeval connection. Anup was featured in The World’s Top Wildlife Photographers book (Rotovision 2004) and in Horzu magazine (February 2010) as one of the five best wildlife photographers in the world. He is also one of the 10 ‘Masters’ featured in the book Masters of Nature Photography (Natural History Museum September 2013). In the past, Anup has exhibited (solo) at venues such as Visa Pour L’Image and (group) The Natural History Museum, London. More recently, in 2016, he had solo exhibitions at Umbria World Festival, Italy, Konica-Minolta Gallery, Tokyo and Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa.

© Emilija Petrauskienė (Lithuania) “Silver Garden“

Silver Garden is a childhood garden frozen in silver. My project started from an idea to recreate a childhood’s garden. Which is always wonderful like a dream - full of colourful flowers with bees and butterflies fluttering around, fragrant herbs, light playing between leaves and secret. I did spend my early childhood in such a garden, which was surrounded with thick forest. Under old apple trees we played with dolls, made from Clematis dead blooms and Pflox flowers, and ate rhubarb stalks dipped in the sugar. This garden I create is like time-travel backwards, where was no rush. Where we haven’t counted our time in minutes or seconds and summer holidays felt like lasting forever. So I chose ancient wetplate collodion technique creating the result similar to engravings and lithographs, also searching for compositions reminding old herbariums. I use slow photography while the process itself takes me back time. This project is ongoing - I create garden not only on silver, but also behind the window. Where I collect interesting plants and then catalogue them on wetplate. All works I presented here are scanned silverprints from wetplate collodion negatives.

I was born in 1981. I am a full time family doctor. Art and later photography was always my hobby besides my full time job. I started taking photographs more than 10 years ago all learning by myself and with online communities. The prime aim was to create beautiful family album, but all went further. Now using almost only analogue techniques I capture my everyday life and create my silver herbarium. With some works from Silver Garden series I was twice featured in LensCulture competition gallery.

© David Ellingsen (Canada) "The Last Stand"

As a youngster on Cortes Island, in Canada’s Pacific Northwest, I walked daily through the woods to catch the school bus, passing by remnants of the old growth forest. These giant looming stumps, peering through the second growth trees as far as I could see, seemed an ominous presence. They remain so. Five generations of my family have been a part of the forest industry in British Columbia from falling old growth trees and clear cutting to contributing to local sustainable harvest initiatives and environmental responsibility. My great grandfather and great uncle, in providing for their families and future, fell many of the actual trees whose remnants you now see in these photographs. It was in this familial context, filtered through the contemporary environmental crisis and thoughts of my responsibilities in that regard, that the seeds of this series were sown. As this project began these iconic remains of the old forest served as a meditation on the human-altered landscape but soon evolved into a metaphor for the natural world that supports me, the contemporary globalized culture I am an active part of and the essential incompatibility of the two. The cognitive dissonance arising from this dilemma of participation in, and yet responsibility for, the fouling of one’s own nest was a dominant theme guiding the creation of these photographs. This discomfort resulting from holding two conflicting beliefs or ideals, and perhaps more importantly where it leads one, remains a key motivator in my work. Although the pattern of progress and disaster has been repeated throughout human history, the urgency I now feel in our globalized world is one of scale...a scale said to be so vast, perhaps nearing a point of no return. No doubt evolution is progressing as it should, which brings some measure of comfort, yet I cannot help but feel apprehension for the life my family will lead in the not-too-distant future.

David Ellingsen is a Canadian photographer creating images of site-specific installations, landscapes and object studies that speak to the relationship between humans and the natural world. Across his varied projects Ellingsen acts as both archivist and surrealist using hybrids of traditional documentary methods, staged constructions, and photographic process.

© Ole Witt (Germany) “Help Desk - Random Acts of Administration“

An Indian once told me: "In India every 40 kilometers everything changes - the food, the language, the mentality. The only constant are the conditions in the government offices." I wanted to review this thesis and photographed my work in three states and 14 different governmental offices. I found a connection between India and the Western world through their shared love of excessive bureaucracy. From my western point of view I am used to obsessed ways of efficiency, which treat humans as numbers. In India the carelessness of the authorities and the inefficiency with which the employees handle it fascinated me and I began to engage more intensively with the bureaucracy. Although the western world and India could hardly be more opposing both are united by the bureaucratic insanity.

Ole Witt realizes documentary long-term projects and works as a freelance photographer. Before he began studying photojournalism and documentary photography in Hanover at the university of applied sciences and arts in 2014. He also worked as a carpenter in Canada. In 2017 he continued his studies at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, where the project "Help Desk-Random Acts of Administration evolved. Ole Witt lives and works in Hanover.