In my capacity as Project and Exhibition Manager of the independent publishing house Schilt Publishing, I am lucky enough to be one of the experts at the Photo Folio Reviews in the photography festival ‘Les Rencontres d’Arles’. The Photo Folio Reviews are described on the festival’s website as ‘a privileged moment which could be decisive for your (the photographer’s) orientation and your (again, the photographer’s) photographic practice. In the next three days you will be able to find my three favourite finds of the Photo Folio Reviews in Arles!
Isabeau de Rouffignac presented her most recent project ‘Traditions and Culture on borrowed time’. ‘The Akha people,’ she writes on her website, ‘have been in survival mode for ever and are now living on borrowed time.’ These tribes, which call Thailand their home, go back one thousand years but are unfortunately being chased and pushed back by other communities. Their history is ignored and their culture, which has been orally transmitted for more than 65 generations, not well recorded. De Rouffignac has therefore made it her goal to keep trace of these traditions, to convey their values and to encourage their energy and has managed, after having shared their lives during many months and visits to Thailand for the past five years, to gain unique access to these fascinating people.
‘Summa’ and ‘Jasmund’ are the titles of the projects Arno Schidlowski, a photographer living, studying and working in Hamburg, presented to me today. I have especially been taken by the first project he presented to me: ‘Summa’. This series features dark, and mystic images of animals and landscapes, which successfully deal with the tension between the instinctive behaviour of animals, and the documentary-analytical evaluation of the human as an observer. The project as a whole, presented in the form of an artist book, conveys a wholeness , the sequence and pairing of photographs form an atmospheric entity.
Ji Hyun Kwon is a Korean photographer who currently lives and works in Weimar, Germany. Ji Hyun Kwon has, after having received her bachelor’s degree in Law from the Hongik University in South Korea, decided to pursue a career in photography and completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Photography at the Chungang University. She then moved to Germany in 2010, where she is currently studying for her Master of Fine Arts degree at the Bauhaus University. Hyun Kwon has also been the winner of the portfolio reviews of the Month of Photography in Bratislava in 2009 and has also been selected as one of the ‘’Photographers of the Year’’ in South Korea in 2012. And this for a good reason! Today, Ji Hyun Kwon presented her captivating work ‘The Guilty’, which engages with the subjects of guilt, social consciousness and responsibility. Through this series, she has tried to reconcile the guilt of being an artist herself, while, as she has put it, the rest of the worlds continues to suffer. And although Ji Hyun Kwon’s ‘The Guilty’ consists only of portraits of individuals, the project as whole offers the viewer a universality that one does not come across very often in photographic projects. Ji Hyun Kwon’s website is well worth a visit!
To be continued…
