Federico Tisa

Mr. Incredible, how I won this war

During the two lockdowns, my family closed itself in a protective bubble for many months, losing the real knowledge of the outside world to such an extent that our disorientation gener- ated the most varied behaviours. Nicolò, who turned 4 years old in April, suffered the greatest burden of this situation and found himself in the complex situation of having to relate only with adults. For his birthday his mum and I gave him a puppet of his best superhero, Mr. Incredible. Nicolò completely identified with the character to the point of becoming his alter ego. This has helped him to overcome many difficult moments. Mr. Incredible is not afraid of anything. He’s not afraid of the dark or of this virus. He is not afraid of infection because he is so careful and always washes his hands. He is able to defeat this evil and bring the whole world back to the reality of some time ago.

Nina Welch-Kling

Rallentando

Rallentando is a series of candid street portraits and fragments photographed in New York City. At first glance, the candid portraits resemble studio shots devoid of time and place. I reveal the spontaneity of the photographs slowly, through fragmented and off-centered compositions of banal details, inserted throughout the series. While moving through the Rallentando sequence, photos offer visual clues that become part of a bigger mosaic of my daily encounters.

I shoot instinctively and spontaneously. The focus of my frames is often a monotone-colored canvas that pedestrians fill by simply passing through. A stream of colorful impressions reflects the never-ending movement of the busy and crowded city. The muted tones and partially out- of-focus images challenge the boundaries between representation and abstraction by often, within a singular frame, suggesting anonymity and emotional disconnection.

Some people brush by me, others keep their distance; sometimes I capture a gesture, some- times just a flowing lock of hair but all are part of the fabric of the everyday life I love to ob- serve. This series celebrates the brief and kaleidoscopic moments I encounter in the city streets of Manhattan.

Xiangyu Long

Shared Space

A seven-second video on internet transforms Ding Zhen, a simple Tibetan yak herder, into an Internet star overnight. The overnight sensation not only changed Ding Zhen’s life, but also had profound impact on his hometown. Local villagers got inspired to utilize social medias to become influencers. Through social media, the outer world get to know this remote nomadic village, while the village absorbs new trend of the world and change the traditional thinking and customs of the past. The visual contents posted on social media help locals obtain both followers and ad- ditional income. Locals have reformed their living space to accommodate visitors who leave their big-city lives to visit their idols in the village. What was once exclusive family space now has been transformed into a shared space for locals who seek popularity and visitors who try to immerse themselves as deeply as possible in their idea of the romantic, wild life of the local Tibetans.

Tori Ferenc

In Waiting

The series aims to capture the anxieties and joys of pregnancy and first-time parenthood during the coronavirus pandemic. I found out I was expecting in April 2020, a month into the national lockdown. With our families back in Poland, the pregnancy became an intimate experience I shared with my husband. Limited mostly to the space of our apartment, I turned the camera on us. I began documenting our lives in this transformative moment, and I have continued doing so with the arrival of our daughter. I hope to show the accidental poetry of everyday life through the eyes of a mother.

Peter Pflügler

Now is not the right time

This project started out as a story about my father’s suicide attempt. When I was two years old, he went into the woods with the intention of never coming back. While I was revisiting my parents’ trauma – its places, objects and memories that I could not call my own – I found it here, inside myself. My body always knew. So, this is no longer a story about a suicide attempt. This is about the impossibility of secrets, about what we are sharing when we hide. This is about pain inflicted out of love, about the complexity of silence, and the unexplainable sadness of a boy. Mum, Dad, this is your trauma, that you kept wrapped up in countless colorful blankets and yet unknowingly handed over to me in a loving embrace. I will carry it with care.

Frank Krems

The loneliness of the man at the barbecue

The present work thematizes in documentary staged form the supposed attraction of a disparate relationship, but above all its drama, in which our counterpart quickly becomes a stranger to us. It makes clear that social rites, which were originally meant to serve and consolidate the common sense, can have the opposite effect due to circumstances and decrees in times like these, quickly leading to isolation and ultimately to absolute disorientation and a feeling of being alone. What remains is a stale view of something that perhaps once was or could have been – or the view into the patient, no-questions-asked and entertaining opposite: the World Wide Web.

Monika Keiler

About work

With this series, I would like to show the work in the East German food industry, which since the pandemic has been considered system-relevant, but which – unlike the work of nurses or cashiers – remains mostly invisible. This is also because the production facilities where foodstuffs such as noodles, bread or cookies are made are often located on the outskirts of the cities, in the peripheries. Although work here is done in shifts and is monotonous, it is low-paid and often worse than in the western German states.

Daniel Seiffert

Trabants

“Gropiusstadt, that’s high-rise buildings for 45.000 people, with lawns and shopping centers in between. From afar, everything looked new and very well-kept. But when you were between the high-rises, it stank everywhere of piss and poop. This came from the many dogs and the many children who lived in Gropiusstadt. It stank the most in the stairwells.” (from: Christiane F., “Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo”). In 1962, the architect Walter Gropius, together with Willy Brandt, laid the foundation stone for the large housing estate project “Gropiusstadt”. I myself grew up on the other side of the Wall in the 1980s, not 500 meters air- line away. During my first trips to the ‘golden west’, we were warned as children about the place that was synonymous with drugs and violence. Gropiusstadt is still fighting against this bad reputation. My work is an attempt to approach the myth of Gropiusstadt, a portrait along the photographic border between documentary realism and subjective poetry. In what does it become visible, the ambivalent feeling for life of this architectural utopia on the edge of the city, once proudly cast in concrete and now thought to have failed? Since the 50th birthday of Gropiusstadt, I have been portraying its inhabitants – on the edge of Berlin, where the hopes of modern life border on the sewage fields of Brandenburg.

Christian K. Lee

Armed Doesn’t Mean Dangerous

In the United States gun ownership is a constitutional right, however history shows us when African Americans assert these rights they are infringed upon. In my hometown of Chicago, I routinely saw negative portrayals of African Americans with guns: Black people there and in the rest of the country were associated with gangs and criminality, and guns were always deemed dangerous in their hands. But at home, I saw a positive, responsible side of firearms ownership: My father was an Army veteran and a police officer. I became a gun owner myself — one of the 24 percent of African Americans who own guns. The point of this project is to recondition myself, and others, toward the more positive view of Black people and guns, and therefore to promote a more balanced archive of images.

Ruben Hamelink

Living History

As soon as the Civil War ended, veterans organized reenactments to rebuild national unity. Today thousands of highly motivated ‘living historians’ live out their version of what it must have been like to live and fight during ‘the war that forged the nation’. However, the war was fought over the abolition of slavery, something that is not always fully acknowledged. Many of today’s southern reenactors are drawn to the Civil War through a problematic and romanticized version of history. In opposition to this is the »Slave Rebellion Reenactment«, a performance piece by artist Dread Scott in which he organized the reenactment of the German Coast uprising of 1811, the largest slave Rebellion in American history. It created a transformative experience for the participants.

Jerry Takigawa

Balancing Cultures

The series highlights the racism deeply woven into the fabric of our society. A recent discovery of family photographs compelled me to express the shame and loss suffered by my family in „the camps.“ In Japanese American families, when anyone speaks of ‚the camps,‘ they’re referring to the American concentration camps sanctioned by President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. Designed to assuage hostile reactions, they fueled a post-war shadow aspect of an entire Japanese American community. A redacted part of my childhood is revealed through this project. Balancing Cultures represents a dark collective memory – long censored in part by the Japanese precept of gaman (enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience, dignity and silence) and the fear that if their voices became too loud, it might happen again. I raise my voice today, because it is happening again.

Jesse Egner

Disidentifications

“No Femmes. No Fats.” When I started making profiles on gay dating/hookup apps as a teen- ager, this is a phrase I came across frequently, which set precedent that defined my body as unwelcome. Being a queer person with a non-normative body and an invisible disability, the constant rejection from members of my fellow gay community set in motion a battle between my body and my gayness. My series began with self-portraiture – an action that was aggressive due to my aversion to it as a practice. However, it allowed me to begin a visual exploration into non-normative queerness. Utilizing elements such as absurdity, humor, and the uncanny, I even- tually moved on from just self-portraiture, photographing with others in a collaborative process which allowed other narratives and experiences to influence my work.

Sean Lee

Young Love

When I was 17 years old and a student, Esther, the girl sitting beside me in class passed away after a short struggle with an illness, before we did have the chance to say goodbye. Today, I am a part time teacher of photography in a new media school. Looking at my students made me think about the days of my youth. I thought about the friends that I used to hang out with, the times I had fallen in love, and all the nights we spent partying. But it also made me think about her. I often tell my students that photography teaches us above all things that our time here is brief. Perhaps this work is a way for me to say a proper goodbye to my youth, and to Esther.

Heja Rahiminia

Conex living

These portraits are of asylum seekers living in conex boxes in a forest around a small village in the Brandenburg state of Germany. These conexes were originally intended to be temporary and for a maximum of one or two months, but have now been transformed into permanent accommodation. Cold and soulless atmosphere, shared toilets and baths, poor hygiene, lack
of partitions, no privacy, and being distanced from the city and ordinary people are one of the problems that these people are dealing with. Most of them are those who have received a neg- ative answer to their asylum process and are waiting for a trial and retrial of their case, which takes between three to five years.

Shelli Weiler

ENJOY house

The series documents the rise and proliferation of made-for-Instagram selfie factories through- out New York and Los Angeles, presenting such forms of escapist amusement as hostile and uninhabitable environments. Subjects and spaces are produced in the pursuit of ideals, where sites for entertainment are fashioned by their shortcomings. A cold atmosphere emerges from the cumulation of disparate places and their visitors, all of whom become actors participating in the same theater which consists of costumed spaces that take on the appearance of purgato- ries rather than playgrounds. The formal simplicity of greyscale attests to this symbolic power, emphasizing a generation’s inheritance of a modern empty experience.