L E N S C R A T C H

Heather Evans Smith: The Heart and The Heavy

2013-05-22T03:00:00.000-07:00

Portrait week continues...today's post written by Sarah Stankey.

Wade

The first time that I saw the photographs of Heather Evans Smith was when I first started working on Lenscratch and I was putting together one of the large group exhibition that the site hosts. I immediately visited her website and loved what I saw. Heather's work is both technically and conceptually brilliant. This work is transportive and cinematic.

Heather is an award-winning fine art and conceptual portrait photographer based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her work captures both the everyday and the whimsical, telling stories of women and struggle, reality and the surreal. Smith’s work has been featured in solo and joint exhibitions, magazines, literary journals and online publications. She conducts creativity workshops around the country. Recently, she was chosen as winner of Ron Howard’s Project Imaginat10n. In the fall of 2013 her winning image will be brought to life in a short film directed by Jamie Foxx.

A Soft Place To Land

The Heart and The Heavy

Life is full of stories – some deeply personal and specific, others universally relatable. My story is beautiful and complicated and bittersweet and hard. Life is just that way. So are photographs. The birth of my daughter was life-changing, but not in the way I expected. Though there has been no greater joy for me, the responsibility of another life has proven to be at times a heavy load. Thinking about this in a literal sense, I imagined a heavy home on my shoulders, yet held tightly with love – a burden and a joy, a challenge and a reprieve. This became the first image in the series The Heart and the Heavy. From there the stories evolved, just as my life has. The genesis of an image comes from moments of life, like a still from an old movie. Movement and pain and the simple joys of being alive are frozen in time – a study of fictional worlds based in reality. Compelled to shoot these stories, I am haunted for days and months until it is released in an image. Telling someone’s tale in a world not quite like our own.

A Beautiful Smothering

A Slow Sink

Facade

Moored

Collide

Rooted

As The World Collapses Around Her

Domicile

The Unraveling

The Collector

Flight

The Heart and The Heavy

Nir Arieli: Inframen

2013-05-21T03:00:00.000-07:00

When I first started looking at portrait photography for this week, I came across the work of Nir Arieli. I approached him to be featured, but one question from him set me back, “Where did you come across my work?” I had no clue. It wasn’t until I revisited one of my static Tumblr blogs that I had realized that I had been admiring many of his photographs, unknowingly, for quite some time. Hundreds of images were passing by me daily, yet Nir’s portraits seemed to stand out from the rest. It was unfortunately the lack of credit to his work that prevented me from becoming familiar with his name.

In this particular body of work, Nir's editing technique reveals the beautiful subtleties that usually go unlooked. These images are lush with contrast that enhances a super realistic way of seeing the human form. His work also comments on the flaws that are found on even the most beautiful of men. --Grant Gill

Nir Arieli launched his career as a military photographer for the Israeli magazine Bamachane, before receiving a scholarship to pursue a BFA at New York’s School of Visual Arts; he graduated with honors. Nir's photographic passion is within the portraiture and dance fields. He is an admirer of beauty and gentleness, these qualities are the heart of his work.

Inframen

To be a dancer is to work your body to the breaking point. In my project "Inframen", I created a series of portraits using an infrared technique that reveals details that are under the subject's abused skin. I am taking the dancers out of their roles as performers and revealing personal intimate individuals. Through these subtle and surreal portraits, I aim to continue my studies of contemporary male dancers, peeling the physical shield and exposing fragile human beings - The scars show on their skin and in their eyes.

Patrizia Fusi

2013-05-20T03:00:00.000-07:00

Patrizia Fusi and I met while I was a student at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and she was a study abroad student from Rome, Italy. I had the opportunity to get to know her as her friend and student mentor. And I even had the great pleasure of visiting her in Rome last summer! Patrizia is a very talented artist and photographer. I am so happy to share some of her fashion work and fine art work today on Lenscratch! -- Sarah Stankey

Patrizia Fusi is a both a fashion photographer and a fine art photographer. She was born in 1990 in Rome, Italy. She studied at a science high school and graduated college from the Instituto Europeo di Design (IED Roma) in June 2012. Patrizia's work has been published in Poutpourri Magazine, Impostor Magazine, Fashion E-zine and on Vogue.com.cn.

Phychometries

We know the world through our senses: sight, touch, taste, sound and smell. Everything has some sort of shape.

In every single moment, we increase our knowledge, storing up new things and concepts. But what's the shape of this process? How does the act of learning, thinking, feeling look like? What is its shape?

Everything could be reduced into lines. Religions use sacred geometries, symbols, psychedelia uses geometries too.

By studying the different uses of the geometry, I ended up with the idea that the abilities of our minds can be represented with the purest, most essential and perfect shapes: Geometries.

These images are negative black and white silver prints over which I sewed and embroidered.

Lenscratch Exhibition Opportunities

2013-05-19T03:00:00.000-07:00

LENSCRATCH is creating exposure opportunities for photographers with group on-line exhibitions. Photographers will be allowed ONE entry per exhibition and ALL photographs will be published. I firmly believe in having occasional unjurored opportunities that allow for community and conversation. International submissions are welcome!

Submission Guidelines:

Image size: 72dpi at 1000px on the long side, save as a jpg.

Send name, title, location (where you captured the image), and link to your work (website or other). It makes it easier for us if you follow the example below EXACTLY.

Example:

Aline Smithson, The Red Rose, Los Angeles, CA http://www.alinesmithson.com

In the subject of your e-mail, type the name of the exhibition (example: CELL PHONE PHOTOGRAPHY) and e-mail to:

lenscratch2@gmail.com (don't forget the "2")

If your images are sized incorrectly or the submission is incomplete, they will not be posted.

Submission Categories and Due Dates:

Due Date: May 19th

BACKYARD

Exhibition to run on May 31st, 2013

image by Aline Smithson

Due Date: June 9th

LENSCRATCH STUDENT COMPETITION

Exhibition to run on June 28th, 2013

image by Sarah Stankey

Open to all students: high school, BFA, MFA, Continuing Education

a scan of your student id will be required...for the 2012-2013 school year.

LENSCRATCH is awarding 1st, 2nd, 3rd place prizes and 2 honorable mentions: each winner will receive a focused post on their work and given world wide exposure. There are no fees involved, but guidelines must be followed correctly to be considered:

Submit 10 images from one body of work--work that is shot with intention and has something to say. Images need to be 72 dpi, 1000px on the long side, saved as jpgs.
Submit a well written statement for the work
Submit a written bio
A scan of your student id
Also include: age, name of school, if you are pursuing a degree, website (if you have one) and one sentence as to why you are a photographer.

Alma Haser: Magenta Foundation Bright Spark Winner

2013-05-18T03:00:00.000-07:00

I had the great pleasure of being one of the judges for the Magenta Foundation's Flash Forward Competition. Judges and entrants came from the U.S., Canada, and the UK and after spending days going through over 600 portfolios more than once, we narrowed down our choices and then had a lively debate over who should win the Bright Spark Award. This year Alma Haser received that honor for her project, Cosmic Surgery.

Alma has also been shortlisted for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize for 'The Ventriloquist'. Her shortlisted portrait, taken in her house in South London, is of friends Luke and James who have known each other since they were 12. Struck by their hairstyles, an East London bowl cut, Alma initially planned to take separate portraits but it was difficult to get them to focus so decided to photograph them together. She says ‘I asked them to sit on a tiny, wobbly coffee table, forcing them to almost cling onto each other. I wanted to exaggerate their amazing size difference, by making Luke slouch and James sit bolt upright. The title is designed to help the viewer make up his or her story about what is going on.’

Born in Germany in 1989, Alma moved to the UK in 1995 and received a BA in Photography from Nottingham Trent University before moving to London in autumn 2011. Her work has been included in over 10 exhibitions internationally, receiving third place in the People’s Choice for Foto8 Summer Show 2012, and Fourth prize in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Awards at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Cosmic Surgery

Since leaving University in 2010, Alma has been working on self-portraits, being her own willing and available model. More recently she has started taking portraits of other people and is interested in making work that has a disquieting or disconcerting resonance. The series has three distinct stages. Firstly Alma photographs her sitter, then prints multiple images of the subjects face and folds them into a complicated origami modular construction, which then gets placed back onto the original face of the portrait. Finally the whole thing is re-photographed.

Origami is very meditative, you can get lost in the world of folding for hours. It is also extremely delicate and fragile, so by giving each geometric paper shape somewhere to sit within the final image, the origami has been given a backbone.

There is something quite alien about the manipulated faces, as if they belong to some futuristic next generation. In these portraits the children become uncanny, while their parents are seen in a more familiar moment.

With the simple act of folding an image Alma can transform each face and make a sort of flattened sculpture. By de-facing her models she has made their portraits into her own creations.