The streets of Paris are lined with cafes and museums. In Rome, you’ll find roads that predate Julius Caesar. But only Venice has streets of water. In his new photography collection, Monumental Venice, Jacques Boulay aims to capture the essence of a city that’s unlike any other. Through huge, panoramic landscapes and intimate, contained portraits, Boulay seeks out (and finds) what makes Venice Venice.
Italy may have been unified since the mid-19th century, but visiting just several of its major cities is enough to make it obvious that cultural homogeneity is virtually nonexistent. My mini-tour of the country began in Naples, capital of the southern Campania region and my home base for exploring the nearby archaeological sites and coastal towns, and concluded in Venice, the revered cradle of modern democracy.
Focusing on the inherent tension between reality and fiction in photography, Mónika Sziládi’s digital collage constructions investigate the complexities of human behavior and group dynamics. Her photographs illustrate the paradoxical relationship between the multitude of possibilities for re-invention and individual expression offered by society along with the pressure for assimilation perpetuated by interactions with new media. Hrvoje Slovenc documents psychologically charged domestic environments that evoke the illusory relationship between fact and fiction. He possesses a deep interest in the many visual languages photography offers.
Entr'ouvert originates in our desire to integrate photographic images of different origins into diptychs, whose nature is to shed new light on their constituent parts. The combination of the images chosen here shows the relation between man and the urban or rural landscape, the relation between ‘internal’ (the intimate dimension) and ‘external’ (the social dimension). It is our wish to avoid whatever narrative might originate from the single images used in the diptychs : there is no story, there is no text.
China is kinetic. Frenetic. A constant barrage of dutiful chaos a billion souls strong. It’s a place where grandma and grandpa still don the blue Mao suits, while their upwardly mobile offspring drive late model Porsche SUVs. Today, the Western world is fixated on China’s economic growth and mixed market economy, but we rarely see or hear about the Chinese people and their daily life.
There’s a restlessness to Rian Dundon that defines much of his work. Sitting over coffee, the 31-year-old photographer checks his phone, then his watch. He looks past the window, capturing mental images of the world outside. Then he returns. It’s that same nervous energy -- a sort of daring uncertainty - that animates the subjects of his forthcoming book on the Chinese city of Changsha, a one-time stronghold for Mao Zedong’s incipient Communist Party.
Over the years I would take many walks and bike rides through Laurel Hill Cemetery. But it wasn't until a few years ago that I started taking pictures there. I'd recently begun learning about the history of the place and felt a need to document it, to try and capture the essence of the ancient pockmarked stone – and the mostly unnamed craftsmen who carved it – in a way that was authentic and unadulterated.
The way the story comments on Laura’s standing in her relationship and family is the only poignant aspect of the movie. You feel sympathy for her from early on and can tell she feels constrained in a relationship that’s lost its spark. Once she tells David what happened to her, he quickly takes on the responsibility of revenge as a way of proving his masculinity, and Laura’s father soon does the same. While the movie tries to do something different with an old cliché, the way it’s executed stills seems a tad exploitative .
All the stories here are closely observed, showcasing the author’s exemplary skill at painting secondary characters with a simple literary flourish: “Myra was little, she was mere, rat-faced and meager, like a nameless cut in a butcher’s window in a demolition area.” Also, Mantel reliably locates the right sensory details to evoke a childhood disrupted by arcane family dynamics and the ambition to escape provincial life in the North of England.
