Search results for ""Hemeria""

From 1839 when it was invented, photography has served to create portraits of individuals, and soon thereafter portraits of families, later placed in photo albums. Photography, collected and archived, entered the intimate sphere, enabling people to arrange the fragmented images of their lives as they saw fit. Following its forerunners (miniature portraits, silhouettes, physionotraces), the photographic portrait also served the new expectations of the emerging urban bourgeoisie and its need for social representation. Studios opened up in cities everywhere to meet the fast growing demand. In addition, the new medium distinguishted itself with its esthetic superiority. "Even as it emerged, although the technique was still very primitive, photography enjoyed an exceptional quality of artistic finish (Gisèle Freund)". What can photography show us to day of the visible and invisible aspects of family sociology? "How do the roles we expect them to play betray the emotional realities and complexities of lived life?" wonders Daniel Mendelsohn, in his introduction entitled "Unknown Faces/ Redeeming Structures". By creating this corpus of fixed black and white images, each composed in a large 5'x7' frame, the photographer has produced a work of anthropological scope, reaching beyond representation by placing the subject at palpable distance, thereby objectifying it. What should we think of these seemingly impassive faces and their hypnotic gazes, what should we think of these postures, seated or standing? What goes on within these families and outside the frame? The use of a rigid protocol similar in all sessions makes every family portraits intriguing, and encourages our reflection. Inspired by the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose esthetics of objectivity tended towards minimalism, Isabelle Boccon-Gibod, a self-made artist, with an interest for technique, has played with a frontality quite similar to that of the Bechers, resting on the idea that our bodies, when joined together, form a sort of architecture. The idea, also, that a face, deprived of its smile, offers a neutrality of expression worth considering: masks fall and reveal a nakedness (naked truth?) to be admired and deciphered beyond the appearances of social games. She was guided, yet not limited, by this principle: the image of a family seen as a façade-like structure, in which faces are the windows.

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In 2018, the VII Foundation asked more than a dozen renowned reporters and photojournalists to revisit countries with which they had become achingly familiar during times of brutal conflict. The task was to see peace through the prism of their journalistic experience; to survey familiar towns and villages; to reconnect with women, men, soldiers, civilians, statesmen, and students who had survived the conflict or grown up in the postwar society; to discover what the lived experience of “peace” feels like. To augment this reportage, the VII Foundation sought input from academics and peacemakers. And they invited citizens of those countries to give their very personal narratives, in their own voices. Hard edges were not softened nor unpalatable impressions deleted. They wanted to show the truth as seen and experienced by those that lived and those that reported on seemingly intractable civil wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina Cambodia, Colombia, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and Rwanda.The result is Imagine: Reflections on Peace - a curation of searing images and trenchant essays that show both micro and macro views of peace, with its uneven degrees of economic success, political stability, and social harmony. In this stunning collection, worldrenown journalists and authors take us into societies that have suffered searing conflict - and survived. Photographic essays make the stakes during war and peace grippingly palpable. Compelling backstories about negotiations, tales of survival, and accounts of the search for inner peace make the big picture personal. Imagine offers a rare glimpse into the unvarnished story of peace, a window into what it takes for societies and individuals to move forward after unspeakable brutality.

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As she crosses Asia on her own, the path of a 30-year-old French girl accidentally crosses that of a unique religious community, tiny and composed exclusively of women. They live in Puntsokling: one of the ten totally destitute Buddhist nunnery of Zanskar, a valley on the edge of the Himalayas in northwestern India, still isolated from the rest of the country by its inhospitable geography.This meeting at the end of the world will change the course of her existence and, without a doubt, that of the nuns. A revelation and a long human as well as spiritual journey.Caroline Riegel's book is a two-sided journey. Through the story she tells us, we discover both the charm of a unique "tribe" with astonishing sorority (a journey into the intimate) and the masterful beauty of their territory (a journey into the landscapes). But humans are inseparable from the environment in which they live. Here, the harshness of the elements did not generate that of the characters but their dazzling vitality. The hostile environment strengthened hearts, embracing in one movement the spirituality and uncompromising beauty of Nature. Devoid of the superfluous, these Sowers rub shoulders with the essence of the soul, the awareness of Happiness.Caroline Riegel's photographs demonstrate the closeness that she has created with her "subjects", giving photographic work the power to reveal the Other and to make him access the universal. The still image gives them a voice and opens up intercultural and intergenerational dialogue. Caroline Riegel is not just a simple spectator, her photography is not sidelined, it does not freeze the Other. On the contrary, it is the source of life, and testifies to the flourishing of bodies, faces and souls. Her camera is a tool she uses to testify to the uniqueness of this extraordinary community to as many people as possible.Caroline Riegel delivers a luminous tribute, in images and words, to these women who have found, in the heart of the Zanskar mountains, far from the modern world, a balance of life. Faced with destitution: joy. Faced with loneliness: solidarity. In the face of autarky: authenticity.In the same way that Matthieu Ricard - the preface's author - speaks of wonder to the world, the smile of The Sowers of Joy testifies to their singular gaze on what surrounds them, on the meaning of existence, on simplicity of life.In the great tradition of books by traveling photographers, The Sowers of Joy is both an ode to Nature, a unique encounter with otherness, an openness to the world, a quest for meaning, a tribute humanist, a family album where love, respect and benevolence burst out on every page.Photographer Caroline Riegel has lived day after day with these nuns from afar. His photographs are snapshots of simple gestures in a mostly agrarian community, where each activity gives its rhythm to the unfolding of the days, according to the seasons. Often ancestral practices, carried by a Buddhist culture almost 1000 years old.

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Why criss-cross Iceland in all directions, in all seasons, when the world is so vast? For the inner exile offered by this walk on the heights. For the first snows that upset the landscape and teleport us into a charcoal painting. For the spring which will bring back with the birds a forgotten sweetness. For the summer with days without night. For the rare men and women I have been lucky enough to meet. For the infinite range of emotions aroused by these boreal steppes. For the space, the freedom, the omnipresence of natural forces, which help to breathe deeper. To find the oldest living All Black in a hospice in Auckland, to share a vintage wine with Jim Harrison in his house in Montana, to draw the portrait of penguins in Antarctica, to cross the rivers of Iceland on foot… Photographer, journalist, author and speaker, Olivier Joly has always let his steps guide him towards emotions and encounters. Surveyor of large geographical spaces and human intimacy, he saw over time his intimate compass pointing to the cold and windy ends of the world. This is how he found his promised land. Twenty trips and a year on the spot have made him one of Iceland's most knowledgeable connoisseurs. After the success of his book Four Seasons in Iceland, he now looks at it in black and white.

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This book offers an incomparable spectacle, that of an intimate face-to-face with the animal, here treated as a subject in its own right, on an equal footing with man, and it encourages us to take the time to contemplate it, to better question our relationship to the wild world and our place in it. And if the photographer has long since chosen black and white, it is to better play with the incomparable light of Africa, its singular purity that gives the feeling of being in direct contact with the material, without filter. Laurent Baheux's approach is not that of a naturalist or ethology-loving photographer, he does not seek to describe behavior or to unravel the mystery of a sensitive area of the animal that has remained unknown until now. What he finds with African elephants is the feeling of a rediscovered plenitude, of wonder at the world, of a rebirth, of a reconnection with the living. Far from the crowds and the urban world, it is in the heart of African national parks that he experiences the deep meaning of life, and that he offers himself the luxury of slowness, essential when he is 'is about letting the animal approach. The elephant obliges man to humility. We are nothing compared to his power and his intelligence. It is he who decides on the meeting, or, on the contrary, who imposes his distance. We are only "tolerated guests", as Laurent Baheux reminds us. The elephant is not a predator and it is the man who threatens its existence today, competing with it for the control of a territory which is shrinking more and more every day. The pressure of human activities, the demographic growth are the dangers which endanger its survival. As an extension of his militant commitment and his anti-speciesist discourse which seeks to break down the psychological barriers linked to the categorization of animals – wild, farmed, domesticated – according to their degree of utility or their "nuisance" power, Laurent Baheux provides new proof of the need to save elephants and protect their environment, not just because they populate our collective subconscious, from illustrated children's books to the travel stories of early explorers, but because they are closely linked to the balance of our planet and that they refer us, like mirrors, to our own finitude, ineluctable, we who resemble them so much, so strong and so fragile at the same time. "Courage is the reverse, the armed arm of wonder. [...] Where many, cynical or disillusioned have retreated, [Laurent Baheux] has this power to rely on the beauty of things, to believe in it and to be enraged at seeing it mistreated. He has that faith."

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How best to tell the life story of a fashion photographer? What was the common thread composing his career? How does his body of work and progression tie into the history of fashion photography? Regards spans 4 decades of the extraordinary professional career of a photographer whose discretion and elegance are reflected in this dedicated retrospective: a tribute to womanhood, to women in all their diversity, showcasing their timelessness, universality, sophistication, boldness, seductiveness, provocativeness and even at times their inaccessibility. A hymn exalting their beauty. This one-of-a-kind book, offering numerous iconic images, also delicately narrates how perception of this femininity has evolved over the years. But above all else, this book tells the story of a man’s love for women, who have always left him fascinated, amazed, overwhelmed and inspired. This work is a confession of love for what women represent to him, a testimonial to how they move the photographer, who has never ceased to admire them with passion.

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