Photographer #085: Julia Fullerton-Batten

Julia Fullerton-Batten, Germany / UK, 1970, has worked for several years on a single project. It is a project on teenage girls that consists of three parts. The first is Teenage Stories, where the girls are placed in settings where they dwarf their surroundings. The second is School Play, where Julia compares Asian and Caucasian schoolgirls. The third is In Between, where the girls are floating in their surroundings. Read the biography on her website to find out what her thoughts behind this project are. The following images come from the three parts of her project.

Website: www.juliafullerton-batten.com

Photographer #084: Zed Nelson

British photographer Zed Nelson, 1968, released his second book called Love Me in 2009. He travelled to 17 countries during a five year period to document the phenomenal global obsession with youth and beauty. In 2001 his seminal book Gun Nation was released. This time he focused on America's deadly love affair with the gun. Zed has a vast archive of stories he has worked on, such as the Ku Klux Klan, Hillbilly Heroin, the French Foreign Legion and more. The following images are from Love Me, Gun Nation and from his archive: Fat Nation.

Website: www.zednelson.com

Photographer #083: Jean-François Lepage

Jean-François Lepage, France, 1960, is a fashion photographer with thirty years of experience in the business. In his photography he often makes use of extra elements such as texts and graphics. Something else that is remarkable in Lepage' photography is his use of lighting. Often one can see the flash in the middle of his images, close to the portrayed. In 2009 Lepage got free rein to interpret the vision of the ANDAM fashion awards winners. This resulted in the book Modernes. The following images come from his portfolio and from the book Modernes.

Website: www.two-eyes.com

Photographer #082: Kevin O'Connell

Kevin O'Connell, 1958, is an American photographer who's main interest lies with machinery of energy development. His photographs consist of pumps, tanks, towers, wind turbines and pylons. Although there is a certain beauty in these machines and objects, it also raises questions about how we deal with our horizon and environment. These machines will one day break down and decay, but they will leave scars on the environment. O'Connell asks himself various questions, one of them is; What is the fate of the horizon? The following images come from the series Conventional Entropy, Everything Comes Broken and Big Burn.

Website: www.kmoconnell.com

Photographer #081: Peter Bialobrzeski

Peter Bialobrzeski, 1961, is a German photographer with an impressive number of books published in the last several years. In 2009 two books were released. One of them was Paradise Now, which deals with how we treat nature in these times of urban growth. The other is Case Study Homes about urban structures in shantytowns. In 2007 his book Lost in Transition came out, where he examines the transformations of urban wastelands in 28 different cities all over the world. The following images come from these three books.

Website: www.bialobrzeski.de

The magpie's tale

The wonderful Iberian Azure-winged Magpies Cyanopica cooki are now busy getting around in gangs of youths and adults, making their presence felt with their raucous cries. They are a species of open, savannah-type woodland and their native habitat in Iberia is the Stone Pine Pinus pinea woodland.

For some time we hadn't realised the importance of these pine woods and many thought that they were largely introduced. True, many coastal pine woods have been planted but we know that they have been there for millennia. In our excavations at Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar we have found charcoal remains of Neanderthal camp fires. The charcoal belonged to the Stone Pine and we have found such remains in all the archaeological levels, the oldest being around 50 thousand years old. So coastal Stone Pine woods, in warm climate and sandy soils, have been around for a long time creating spectacular Mediterranean savannah landscapes.

For a long time too we had been under the mistaken impression that pine woods were not the natural formations in Iberia that had instead been dominated by oak woods. But the reality is that wherever we look in archaeological and lake pollen sites, the natural vegetation of large areas of Iberia was pine dominated. When we find Azure-winged Magpies today in oak dehesas (managed parkland) we are seeing them in secondary habitats; they are habitats that suited them because they had a similar structure to their native pine woods (not too dense to make closed forest which they don't like).

The other great misconception that was prevalent when I started birdwatching was that the Iberian Azure winged Magpies were not native here. Instead the colourful birds had been brought back by Portuguese mariners from China and escaped. We were looking at feral birds. How else could we explain a small range in south-west Iberia and a larger one in China, Korea and Japan, and nothing in-between?

Then we found the fossil remains of the Azure-winged Magpies in our caves too, along with the Stone Pine charcoal, going back 40 thousand years. Everyhting changed overnight. These magpies had been here all along!

Since then genetic studies of the Iberian and East Asian birds have revealed a separation that is probably over two million years old and the differences between them warrant giving them species status. So we have the Eastern Azure-winged Magpie C. cyanus and the Iberian one.

...and it helped us understand something else that we had been suspecting for a while - that the mid-latitude belt between Portugal and China had once been a vast belt of savannah that was broken down when the deserts of Central Asia, Arabia and the Sahara expanded.

Today, these beautiful, intelligent and social birds occupy the medium-sized crow job in the open woodland. Where the trees become too dense, they are gone and it is the Jay Garrulus glandarius (below) that takes over.

...and where trees are to few the Black-billed Magpies Pica pica and Jackdaws Corvus monedula rule (below).

But the Iberian Azure-winged Magpie will always have a place in my heart - because of its social character, antics, intelligence, and because they taught me a huge lesson in biogeography!

Photographer #080: Kimiko Yoshida

Kimiko Yoshida, Japan, 1963, has build an impressive body of work that consists of self-portraits. The oppression she felt in her homeland made her leave Japan. About her work and Japan she says the following: "Since I fled my homeland to escape the mortifying servitude and humiliating fate of Japanese women, I amplified, through my art, a feminist stance of protest against contemporary cliches of seduction, against voluntary servitude of women, against "identity" defined by appurtenances and "communities", against the stereotypes of "gender" and the determinism of heredity."
The following images come from the series Paintings Self-Portraits 2010, Blown Glass Symbols 2009 and Self-Portraits 2006-2009.

Website: www.kimiko.fr

Photographer #079: Polixeni Papapetrou

Polixeni Papapetrou, Australia, 1960, used to make images that dealt with identity and contemporary culture, but now takes photographs that concentrate on the themes of childhood and childhood memories. She often uses her own children, Olympia and Solomon, in her photographs. In her latest series Between Worlds, she made images of children with masks. Even though it seems the photographs are merely humouristic, there is a serious underlying theme. The following images come from Between Worlds, Haunted Country and Dreamchild.

Website: www.polixenipapapetrou.net

Special #003: Robert Overweg

Is photography only possible in the physical world? Robert Overweg, 1983, The Netherlands, shows us that the limits of photography have not yet been reached. Robert is a photographer in the virtual world. The border between the "real" world and the virtual is slowly fading and merging together. Make sure to press here for an interesting article about his work. The work of Robert is important. As photography is always evolving, we need people like Overweg to look for new borders within the photographic range. The following images come from the series The end of the virtual world, Glitches and Documenting Current Spaces 07-09.

With interest we will be keeping an eye on Roberts work, curious to see what he will find in the virtual world.
Website: www.shotbyrobert.com

Photographer #078: Wang Qingsong

Wang Qingsong, China, 1966, makes large, staged images that are printed in enormous sizes. His photograph China Mansion stretches to the length of 12 meters. Qingsong is sometimes described as the 'enfant terrible of Chinese art photography'. He often uses themes as China's consumer culture and materialism. He has described his work as "kitschy, but powerful ... contradictory, but critical." Apart from photography he also works with video. The following images are Safe Milk, Dormitory, China Mansion and Follow Me.

Website: www.wangqingsong.com

Photographer #077: Ambroise Tezenas

French photographer Ambroise Tezenas, 1972, has won various awards for his photographic work. Currently he is working on a large series called Dark Tourism. He travels to places where as a tourist you can visit sites where disaster has taken place. Examples are; the Sichuan Wenchuan Earthquake Ruins tour, where you can visit the southwestern area of China where 90000 people were killed during the earthquake, or Prypiat, the town that became a ghosttown after the Chernobyl disaster.

In 2007 his book Beijing: Theatre of the People came out about the Hutongs of Beijing and their downfall. These traditional blocks of Beijing with small alleys had to move for new large buildings with giant boulevards.

Website: www.ambroisetezenas.com

Photographer #076: Reiner Riedler

Reiner Riedler, Austria, 1968, is a photographer who has published various books. In 2009 his book Fake Holidays came out, bizarre photographs of fake places that give people a sence of adventure or a way to escape their daily life. In his most recent series Between the Lines, Reiner is trying to simulate scenes from novels he reads, thus giving his visual interpretation through staged photographs. Riedler has also travelled extensively, amongst which are many trips to Eastern Europe. Several images have been combined in his series On the way. The following images come from Fake Holidays, Between the Lines and On the way.

Website: www.photography.at

Photographer #075: Platon

Platon Antoniou, UK/Greece, 1968, is a portrait photographer. His images have been on the covers of Time, New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone and many more. In 2004 his book Platon's Republic was released. He has taken portraits of politicians, moviestars, fashion designers aswell as Greek people and soldiers. Platon lives in New York and works as a staff photographer for The New Yorker. The following images are various examples of his photography.

Website: www.platonphoto.com