Porto Photo Festival presents the exhibition “womenSEEwomen” in collaboration with Photos de Femmes Festival.
womenSEEwomen is the premiere exhibit of the Photos de Femmes organization, which was created to give a powerful voice to iconic representations of women. As Executive Director Renée Jacobs has said, “Women can not be heard unless we can be seen.” Photos de Femmes is committed to diversity and will be continuing to promote positive depictions of women around the world. Jacobs, who is the recipient of the International Photography Award for Fine Art Nude and whose images have been published around the world, most notably in her solo monograph, RENÉE JACOBS’ PARIS, will be giving two guided walks at the venue to further discuss the exhibit and the role of images of women in our current age—October 18 at 4:30pm-6:30 pm and again on October 20 at 11:00 am – 1:00 pm.
womenSEEwomen includes 9 female photographers’ images of women, including such internationally recognized artists like Maggie Steber of National Geographic and artists exhibiting for the first time.
Time magazine recently announced that 2017 and 2018 could each arguably be called the year of women. The Festival wants to ensure that women are seen, this exhibition is dedicated to providing a platform for women artists.
womenSEEwomen
Porto Photo Fest
until November 4
Centro Portugues de Fotografia
PHOTOS de FEMMES- Photographers Artist’s Statements
CARMEN de VOS
Website: www.carmendevos.com/
In my series Birth I portray pregnant women. I’m interested in walking the fine line between death and birth, between caring and rejecting. I long to play with the clichés that surround pregnancy and motherhood. I dare, I challenge, I laugh, I cherish women who are just that tad deliciously wicked, audacious, pushing the portrait beyond the boundaries of ordinary life. Carrying new life makes women strong and invincible. I make these portraits with old Polaroid camera’s on long-expired film because I’m afraid to lose the tangibility of materials and the slow process of making which goes with real slow human contact. The result of these sessions are real objects, real photos that I can connect to, like new mothers connect with their child when they first hold it.
SUSAN de WITT
Website: www.susandewitt.net/Susan de Witt is a fine art photographer living in Portland, Oregon. She began studying photography almost 20 years ago and has been printing her film-based photographs in her darkroom on suitable papers for about 15 years. With the female form as her muse, her style brings forth a strong editorial/fashion quality, with images that have a contemporary edge while maintaining a painterly quality of light. She strives for an ethereal and nostalgic look in her imagery that also gives a questionable authenticity to reality. She finds there is a tangible connection between women that allows a certain ease and comfort between photographer and muse. It’s a kind of intimacy that is long lasting, with easy physical closeness and trust.
JACQUELINE ROBERTS
Website: www.jacquelineroberts.com
Jacqueline Roberts’ work presents a collection of intimate portraits. She works using obsolete photographic techniques (wet plate collodion) and makes albumen prints, cyanotypes, and bromoils. Reviving the craft associated with photography constitutes an essential part of her process, from mixing her own chemistry, cutting her glass plates to working around chemical flaws. Her award-winning portraits have featured in publications such as New York Magazine, the Royal Photographic Society Journal, Drome Magazine and China’s Photographers Companionamong others. Her work has been exhibited internationally. She has published three books and her fourth monograph, Nebula, has just been released by Italian art publisher DAMIANI.
Another essential aspect in my work is to pause and take the time to create an image. My portraits are about that, time. Time passed. Time elapsed. Time suspended. Time ahead or behind us. The portraits from the series Nebula required long exposures which eased the sitters into detaching themselves from their immediate surrounds, as if suspended in time and in space. The individuals in these portraits are neither children, nor adolescents. I wanted their portraits to emerge from that state of limbo to evoke the transitional stage that they are going through. Nebula, Latin for mist, reflects on the turmoil of growing up with all its relational, psychological and emotional changes.
ELISABETH SUNDAY
Website: https://elisabethsunday.blogspot.com/
The heart of native culture, is women. Strong, powerful women. They are the wisdom keepers and the backbone. Indigenous women remain connected in ways that the west has forgotten, making my photographs of women, essential reminders as to who we are, and where we come from.
Women are the spiritual creative; the Anima. We are the first to be bonded with Nature. We are the strength; the vision, and the wisdom that build and shape life. As such, these are the characteristics I value in my portraits. I use a mirror of my own design, to enhance and reveal, our internal nature that connects us to something greater. The artifact of the mirror— elongation— is the archetype for spirit. This quality disengages my photographs from being seen as ethnographic or documentary, and instead creates a transcendent image that speaks to core nature. Inherent in all my photographs, is the resiliency, personal power, and spiritual strength, required of us to survive. We are: The mothers, sisters, and daughters of the world.
RENÉE JACOBS
Website: www.reneejacobs.com
Renée Jacobs is the recipient of the International Photography Award for Fine Art Nude. Her photos have been exhibited and published in galleries, books and magazines around the world. She is the Director of the Photos de Femmes photo festival in the south of France, dedicated to promoting powerful and positive images of women. “Renée Jacobs’ photographs of the female form bring the viewer elements of sensuality, elegance, grace, and beauty. The cornerstone of her images have reflected female empowerment throughout her career, as she handles herself with an intelligence and confidence that have made her images sought after by collectors worldwide. Jacobs seems to be the perfect person to discuss the female gaze, as well as the strength of character behind it.”—Michael Kirchoff, BLUR Magazine. Her latest interview can be seen here:
https://www.catalystinterviews.com/interviews/2018/7/rene-jacobs
ANNE SILVER
Website: http://www.poeticimageryfineartphotography.com/
Born in 1969, Anne Silver is an American writer and analog photographer who lives in Paris, France. Before dedicating herself full-time to these pursuits, she worked for many years as a psychotherapist who specialized in grief and trauma. Anne’s photography and writing are influenced by her work in helping others to heal and by her own process of healing from the losses in her life. In photographing women, Anne hopes to communicate the themes such as nostalgia, aging, healing, loss, and love in ways that are sensitive, tender, and authentic. In her narrative portraiture, Anne prefers to photograph models (including herself, as many of her photos are self-portraits) who fall outside of the very narrow and constricted standards of western beauty.
MAGGIE STEBER
Website: http://www.maggiesteber.com/main.html
I photograph a lot of women in various circumstances, either those of my own creation, or in real life situations. Each time I do, I feel like I’m photographing a sister or that I’m looking in the mirror. I love being a woman and I want always to be sure that when I photograph a woman, no matter her situation, that the best thing about her is going to come through, even in the worst situations. And also, we are so strong, we are the glue of everything and that thought is always with me, that we can be warriors.
SARAH HADLEY
Website: http://sarahhadley.com/
Sarah Hadley’s photographs and collages are meant to express the joys and heartache of being female in the 21st century. Her images are almost all self-portraits, which illustrate her own experiences, desires and dreams. Created as cyanotypes and photo based collages, they address the female psyche and the strength that comes from aging.
When she was four years old, her family moved to the 4th floor of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (where her father was the Director) and she spent the next 18 years surrounded by paintings by Rembrandt, Titian, Whistler, Sargent and in a house fashioned as a Venetian palazzo. She spent time working in Venice, Italy, the National Gallery and the Library of Congress, and as a photojournalist for a small newspaper in Virginia. In 2009, she founded the Filter Photo Festival in Chicago, which she oversaw for the next seven years. She has had solo exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston and the Loyola Museum of Art in Chicago, and her work has been shown in museums and galleries around the US including the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts (Tampa, FL), the Robin Rice Gallery (NYC) and Fabrik Projects Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). Hadley’s work has also been featured in many publications including B+W Magazine (UK), PDN, L’Oeil de la Photographie, ArtTribune, Shots, Don’t Take Pictures, Lenscratch.com and F-Stop Magazine. She has received grants from the California Center for Cultural Innovation, the Illinois Arts Council, and several fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation. A handmade book of her Lost Venice series debuted last October at Fall Line Press as part of Atlanta Celebrates Photography.
ELIZABETH OPALENIK
Website: https://elizabethopalenik.com/
Elizabeth Opalenik Oakland, California, This peripatetic artist is often on the move with a 40 year career that has found her making images on six continents, seeking the beauty and grace that exists within all things. As a photographic artist, she believes that all good photographs are self portraits that lie somewhere between imagination and dreams. She strives to convey that everyone has an inner beauty to be seen, especially women, authentic and natural in their elements.
For Elizabeth, it is an honor to document the soul and beauty of women…those that accept themselves…unnoticed in an often unaccepting world. To them she says, “Embrace yourself, for you are a work of art.”
Following a life-long dream, she published her first monograph, Poetic Grace-Elizabeth Opalenik Photographs 1979-2007.
