FOCUS: Wessel

"I begin start to live in the world of those photographs"

FOCUS: "Moscow! Hello! Goodbye!" by Andreas Herzoug

"In the 20s, Egon Erwin Kisch, considered to be the creator of literary reportage, described Moscow as follows:…”orgy of contrast, Asian villages with American skyscraper houses, Tinker toy cars and limousine buses, baroque palaces and wooden shacks, street bazaars and shopping centers”. This description pretty much still applies. Maybe the city has become more brutal, more crowded, more hectic, more wealthy, more impoverished, more motorized, but also more modern, open, and more melancholic than ever before."

in here.

Andreas Herzoug's website.

FOCUS: "Stuff i Gotta Remember Not to Forget" by Darin Mickey

"The concept behind Darin Mickey’s photobook is relatively straightforward, in 2001 he began following his father around, documenting his life at work and at home. This photobook has developed into a desire by the photographer to understand what his father did as a salesman and who he was. Mickey created a broader narrative by including his father at home, and those things about home that might define a person. As an investigation into identity, it was directed at his subject, his fathers and indirectly it is about his own identity."
in PhotoBook

Maybe because I have a certain fascination with rovers that wander away from the glamour spotlight of the 'travelers', this photo book from Darin caught my attention. The reason I am suggesting it here is because the execution is remarkable. You can see the complete body of work in it's website (link below).

Darin's website

FOCUS: "Seacoal" by Chris Killip

"During an intermittent period of fourteen months spanning 1983 and 1984, Chris Killip photographed a small hardworking, but tight-knit community, located on the Northeastern coast of the United Kingdom. His subject is the families and individuals who were making their living collecting and selling the coal found on the shore line of this shore line. The coal that is found was called seacoal as thought to be coal arising from the sea. Killip’s project lay dormant until recently resurrected and developed into a published photobook."
in The Photo Book

Killip's website
To buy the book

FOCUS: "Preppers" by Emil Hartvig

"Emil Hartvig, a documentary/art photographer based in Copenhagen, recently returned from the Midwest where he photographed ‘preppers’ in their homes and surrounds.  Preppers are those who are actively preparing for the end of the world—for society as we know it to collapse. These men, women and children study survival techniques as well as store weapons, ammunition and food in order to ready themselves for the end of modern society. They have varying beliefs on how the world will end including nuclear war, terrorism, natural disasters and/or economic collapse."
in Feature Shot

Theories of conspiracy can be seen as a legacy of the cold war, and these 'preppers' are just what is left of the paranoia that governments used as a major resource to control and repress the people. This body of work looks to me as an european perspective of these tribes of scared libertarians (US meaning). Personally, I get scared with these folks.

Emil's website

FOCUS: "Shadow of the Condor" by João Pina

"In 1975, at the height of the cold war, six Latin American countries ruled by right wing military dictatorships created Operation Condor, a secret military plan to eliminate their political opponents. This plan which carried out over 3 years ending in 1978, resulted in “extrajudicial executions” of at least 60.000 people, largely young leftist youths inspired the Cuban revolution and its role models like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

Although Condor has long since ended, many relatives of the victims still don’t know what happened to their loved ones, and the majority of the of those responsible for their deaths and disappearances have never been brought to justice."
in Emphas.is

I remember the first book from João I had the pleasure to see, a book about the opponents of the portuguese authoritarian regime in Portugal that were imprisoned and tortured. A wonderful book dealing with something that I value much: memory. Now I see João facing the same challenge but with the ones that suffered from the dictatorships in South America. João had the good idea of getting crowdfunds for the project that was lay down in 3 phases. I had the opportunity and pleasure of backing João's project in the first 2 phases that were already concluded. Now, João is raising crowdfunds for the 3rd and last phase and I've already donated. Memory must be kept and the lessons must be embedded in our culture.

Please back João's project.

A detail a bathroom of Londres 38, a former clandestine detention and torture center during the miitary dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in downtown Santiago de Chile.

FOCUS: Fish-Work: The Bering Sea, by Corey Arnold

Corey Arnold, 1976, USA, is an Alaskan commercial fisherman as well as a documentary photographer. He received a BFA in photography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. In 2011 he released the book Fish-Work: The Bering Sea which includes images that were made between 2003 and 2010 while he was working as a deckhand on the Bering Sea crabber f/v Rollo. (here)

Corey Arnold's website.

FOCUS: A Wide View of a Hellish World, by Bruce Jackson

Using a Widelux (panoramic camera that makes 24 x 59 mm negatives), Bruce sarted to take photographs of an Arkansas prison which he described as "hell in Arkansas". Some of those pictures can be seen here.

FOCUS: “Chica Barbie” by Carl Bower

“Set against a backdrop of poverty, crime, and the hemisphere’s longest running civil war, nowhere are the contests more ubiquitous and revered than in Colombia.  In these carefully scripted shows of fantasy, beauty as a concept, commodity and singular goal is stripped to its raw elements.  There is no ambiguity or pretense that anything else matters.

The queens are celebrities.  Many of the roughly 400 contests a year can shut down a small town for days as thousands jam plazas and parade routes for a glimpse of them.  Icons of a rigidly defined ideal, the contestants highlight the conflated relationship between beauty and attraction.  Many of them seem familiar, stirring recollections of the same perfect features seen elsewhere, along with the identical flirtatious laughter, mock surprise and relentless optimism.  In their quest for adoration, they erase all traces of individuality.”

Carl Bower’s website.

FOCUS: “Superficielle” by Ricardo Canelas

What happens when an entire city collapses beneath water and the most absolute despair? More significantly, what happens to that same city after such catastrophe? Ricardo Canelas takes us there in the eyes of a spectator that most of the times seems invisible and inconsequent to the routine life of the inhabitants. Resigned, people seem to live holding times, probably still surprised for what happened, perhaps profoundly tired. Canelas carefully composed a vanitas in a form of a photographic set for our own abandonment.

NVM

Ricardo Canelas’ website.

FOCUS: “Lisbon at Night” by Luis Pavao

"There is no demagogy or easy transient here: there is the patient and passionate search from the one who lives in the night. The result is a different look: the night is not autonomous in it’s own space, unsuspected horizons are now overcome, characters that are not waste of the daylight come to live;  they live by those hours their moment of existence (…)”

Translated from the online book store here.

FOCUS: “Bullying in Mirandela” by nelson d’aires

“Past Tuesday, after being beaten by an older student, 12 years old Leandro Pires runaway from school and jumped to Tua river, in Mirandela (Portugal). Twin brother and cousins tried to stop him but with no success. Leandro Filipe Pires, living in Mirandela was a victim of bullying”

Translated from here.
Nelson’s website.

FOCUS: “Israeli Woman” by Victor Ben Tzvi

“ISRAELI WOMEN is a photo-poem in developing stages about western woman in the modern cultural climate; a dialogue between the phenomena and the abstract feminine essence. The project is not a candid documentary work uncovering the phenomena through personal stories. In fact, my sitters are Personages – synthesis of their authentic characteristics and thematically attributed narratives.”

in Burn Magazine
Victor Ben Tzvi’s website

FOCUS: “A Gloomy Day” by Jorge Molder

“Jorge Molder’s photography arises from the changes that these ‘imagined and perfect characters’ delimit in our physical being. They arise from a visual perception that allows for ‘obscure visions’ and establishes the instinctive realization on an independent reality. Independent from the private intensities of people (…). This is the light, at least, this is the light of a Gloomy Day. (…)”

Translated from a review by Joao Miguel Fernandes Jorge.
Jorge Molder’s website.

FOCUS: “Segunda Escolha” by Antonio Pedro Ferreira

“What takes a newly graduated doctor to abandon Portugal and go to Paris? Disappointed with the situation in Portugal, regretting the choice of degree or the courage to runaway with his lover, the photography?
(…)
This runway starts in 1982 and will last to 1984, the period use by the young doctor to remain in Paris chasing Portuguese emigrants, searching for a set of images that could witness and deliver social understanding about them.
(…)
Intense months. Magnum Agency was supervising the work. (…) Never before a Portuguese photographer had this chance.”

Translated from a text written by Luiz Carvalho (the complete version, in portuguese can be found here).

[kgallery] site

Currently being exhibited at K Galeria, Lisbon.

FOCUS: “Altas Luzes” by Rita Carmo

Rita Carmo, photographer for Blitz magazine, showed her perspective of music and musicians  by her photographs taken over the years. Now, some of that work (about 200 pictures) can be found in the book entitled “Altas-Luzes” (Highlights).

Publisher website.
Rita Carmo’s blog.

FOCUS: “Father:Land” by Ara Oshagan

“My father died in June 2000.

A few years before that, he and I decided to embark on a project about Karabagh: a remote mountainous area next to Armenia. A region where the Armenians fought and won a fierce war of independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A region still with militarized borders and no political recognition. A place in transformation: the people, the land, the very way of life in political, social, existential upheaval. A place that is part of our distant homeland.

(…)

Father:Land is a project about origins and identity. A project about a place and a people emerging out of a dark history, transforming, forging a new identity, searching for themselves and a new way of life. And also about a very personal becoming, an emergence.”

in Burn Magazine
Ara Oshagan’s website

FOCUS: “The Accidental Theorist” by Edgar Martins

“The imagery of The Accidental Theorist is less a set of pictures than a series of moments that have become independent of causation or function. It resembles a set of location shots for unmade films from lost scenarios. I am often drawn to spaces where I can prioritise poetic memory over concrete topographies.
(…)
Shooting largely on the same set of Portuguese beaches over a period of two years, I sought  to distance myself from conventional spatial representation. 
Shot with a an analogue 4x5 large format camera and making use of long exposures (but not long enough to register star trails) the images are surprisingly flat. “

Edgar Martins’ website

FOCUS: “An American Nightmare” by Michael F Mcelroy

“Howard Mallinger and his family were hit by the unexpected. They had moved to Sunrise, Florida, 3 years ago from the Bronx to live their version of “the American Dream”: they put down most of their life savings on a condominium. Life was grand, when without any warning Sheryl was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer. Howard was told by the doctors that his wife had only a few months to live, and they should prepare for her death. That’s when things started to spiral out of control. They got behind on their mortgage and utilities. Howard tried to negotiate with their lenders to no avail.  The bank foreclosed on their home and the power was turned off six months ago. With hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills piling up, Howard had to file for bankruptcy.  This is not the script an embattled Howard Mallinger, 65, planned for his twilight years. Though Mallinger is now broke and feels humiliated by his circumstances, his commitment to Sheryl and his kids is unwavering, despite battling his own ailments, including trouble walking.”

in Burn Magazine
Michael F Mcelroy’s website

FOCUS: “Father:Land” by Ara Oshagan

“My father died in June 2000.
A few years before that, he and I decided to embark on a project about Karabagh: a remote mountainous area next to Armenia. A region where the Armenians fought and won a fierce war of independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A region still with militarized borders and no political recognition. A place in transformation: the people, the land, the very way of life in political, social, existential upheaval. A place that is part of
our distant homeland.
(…)
Father:Land is a project about origins and identity. A project about a place and a people emerging out of a dark history, transforming, forging a new identity, searching for themselves and a new way of life. And also about a very personal becoming, an emergence.”
in Ara Oshagan’s website