AsimovsRobot

In 2003, for the first time in its history, the Leica Oskar Barnack Award went to a German photographer. Andrea Hoyer’s photo reportage, a long-term project launched in 1998, documents the longings, perspectives and moods of the Russian population of the post-Soviet era, in sensitively composed black and white photographs.

“I’ve always had this urge for languages and countries,” the photographer explains. Curiosity, a thirst for adventure and the willingness to get involved with other peoples and cultures, also characterize this series. Up until 2002, the photographer returned repeatedly to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia and Ukraine. She always travelled alone, because, according to her particular approach: “I have to be in a certain state of mind to find what I am looking for.”

The pictures, also taken with a Leica M6, show representative elements of the former Soviet Union, such as monuments of Stalin and inside views of the Red Army. The wide expanses of Russia’s landscape, as well as towns and Black Sea beaches, are also featured. Hoyer, who lives in New York, focuses on people’s circumstances: their loneliness, alone or in groups, their lack of orientation, or the security of their circle of family and friends. The photographer does not aim for the bold drama of press photos, but uses her keen powers of observation to intensify moods and how they reflect on her own soul. The result is not a classic reportage, but a very personal view of the countries she visited. The people she portrays are always part of an overall composition: they are often truncated, the architecture and landscapes often correspond to the poses of those portrayed, and merge into complex picture compositions. “It was always composition that interested me,” she explains. Many things seem mysterious at first, no picture can be interpreted immediately; but this makes it all the more inviting to take a closer look.

The Leica Oskar Barnack Award was Hoyer’s first international recognition. Her success at the awards ceremony during the Rencontres d’Arles rewarded her courage and perseverance. For the first time, the festival also brought her work to the attention of a larger audience. Since 2012, Hoyer has begun sculpting and modelling the heads of imaginary persons in clay. She combines this side of her work with her interest in individual and collective memories, and adapts photographic principles to this other medium. “It tackles the same themes that I explored in photography: memory, identity and loss,” the artist explains.

Text from leica-oskar-barnack-award.com

I used to always try for the best outcome but with this have it seems like half of the time a failure also leads to an amazing consequence and story.

Like this from act one in the Underdark:

This sounds like somebody's Saturday RPG session recap. Larian have managed to capture the spirit of this quite well!

What are some fun (non-spoilery) moments you've experienced?

The photographs of Cristóbal Hara show an undiscovered Spain--far from the beautiful beaches and urban centers--full of completely normal people and animals (and all their peculiarities) that reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary. At processions and markets, funerals and bullfights, or simply on the street, Hara positions his camera to extract unexpected details from the hustle and bustle of the provinces.

... Towell’s work showed me that things didn’t need to be presented in neat, linear packages; you could breach the foundational tropes being taught in journalism school. And that made for much more intimate, feeling work that functioned alongside the great longform writing I had also begun to absorb.

I don’t really know how I found it (there wasn’t really a vibrant internet community back then), but I bought “The Mennonites” that year. It’s a book of lyrical and immersive black-and-white photos exploring the world of the Old Colony Mennonites. This was no quick hit wide-shot, tight-shot package like you might produce for a newspaper story. No, Towell threw himself into the lives of the people he was photographing. He spent nearly 10 years doing it! It was an enthralling read then, and continues to be today.

Text by Kenneth Dickerman from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2022/08/17/larry-towells-iconic-mennonites-is-back-expanded-edition/

This image is from Martin Parr's exhibition and accompanying book Bored Couples, published by Agnes B./Galerie Du Jour, 1993.

Colour photographs depict twenty bored couples who have run out of things to say to each other. The book design allows the viewer to open it from the front and from the back, so it reads French one way and English the other. Designed by Peter Brawne. Printed by Balding and Mansell, Norwich. Softback.

You can see several pages from the book on Parr's official website: https://www.martinparr.com/books/#gallery/8__3470940330/193

Though still relatively unknown outside Japan, Tomatsu, now 80, is arguably the greatest and most influential of all the photographers that emerged during his country's turbulent postwar era. Over a span of 50 years, his work has reflected, often obliquely, the changes in Japanese culture as the American military presence and then the unstoppable spread of American popular culture, helped shaped a new outward-looking, consumer-driven nation. Two series of photographs – Protest, Tokyo, 1969 and Eros, Tokyo, 1969 – record the often turbulent youth cultural changes of the time. His book, Oh! Shinjuku, named after a shopping district in central Tokyo, chronicles the rise of a young and rebellious Bohemianism that, as an older outsider, he saw – as he later put it – "through the eyes of a stray dog".

Those words seem prophetic. Tomatsu was one of the giants of Japanese photography that a younger generation of photographers who came to prominence in the late 60s reacted against. Known as the Provoke Movement, after the magazine that published their work, it included Daido Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira and Koji Taki. In its founding statement of intent, Taki wrote: "We photographers must use our own eyes to grasp fragments of reality far beyond the reach of pre-existing language, presenting materials that actively oppose words and ideas ... materials to provoke thought." Forty years on, though, Tomatsu's radical approach – his freeform, expressionist style, odd camera angles, strange cropping and framing – has been reappraised and he is now seen, ironically enough, as one of the pioneers of the Provoke era. What he makes of all this is anyone's guess; he is famously reclusive and has never ventured outside Japan.

Text from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/sep/06/shomei-tomatsu-japanese-photography

For me traveling has always been about discovering myself through other people’s eyes. The more you get to know how they think, live and survive, the more you get to know the real world never revealed to you. You realise the confinement that all these social standards have caused and you are a part of it. A part of a prison with a camouflage of civility. And then you see purity in those eyes and those eyes set you free. They give a meaning to your entire existence. With time it is no longer a pursuit, but a way of life.

• Spiros Soueref

"The power of your Muse lies in her meaninglessness. Even the style can enslave you if you don’t run away from it, otherwise you are doomed for repetition. The only thing that counts is curiosity. For me personally, this is what creativity is about. It testifies itself not in the fear of doing the same thing over again but rather in the urge of not going somewhere you have been before."

• Gueorgui Pinkhassov

Gueorgui Pinkhassov is known for his vivid art-reportage, which elevates the everyday to the extraordinary. His richly-colored images are absorbing, complex and poetic—sometimes bordering on an abstraction which embraces the visual complexity of contemporary life. As well as his global documentary work, Pinkhassov has photographed iconic cultural events from Cannes Film Festival to backstage at Paris Fashion Week. “It is foolish to change the vector of chaos. You shouldn’t try to control it, but fall into it” he says of his approach.

Born in Moscow in 1952, Pinkhassov’s interest in photography began while he was still at school. After studying cinematography at the VGIK (The Moscow Institute of Cinematography), he went on to work at the Mosfilm studio as a cameraman and then as an on-set photographer. He joined the Moscow Union of Graphic Artists in 1978, which allowed him more freedom to travel and exhibit internationally. His work was soon noticed by the prominent Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who invited him to make a reportage about his film Stalker (1979).

Jonas Bendiksen’s sharply evocative images explore themes of community, faith and technology.

Bendiksen was born in Norway in 1977. He began his career at the age of 19 as an intern at Magnum’s London office before leaving for Russia to pursue his own work as a photojournalist. Throughout the several years he spent there, Bendiksen photographed stories from the fringes of the former USSR, a project that was published as the book Satellites (Aperture, 2006).

In 2017 he published The Last Testament (Aperture), which told the story of seven men who all claimed to be the biblical Messiah returned to earth. The Book of Veles (Gost, 2021) probed the vulnerabilities of our perceptions, and became hotly debated after Bendiksen revealed that what had appeared to be a classical piece of photojournalism was in large part synthetic computer-generated renderings.

"Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world" - Bruno Barbey

Bruno Barbey, born in Morocco, has dual nationality – French and Swiss. He studied photography and graphic arts at the École des Arts et Métiers in Vevey, Switzerland. From 1961 to 1964 he photographed the Italians, considering them as protagonists of a small ‘theatrical world’, with the aim of capturing the spirit of a nation.

Over five decades Bruno Barbey has worked in all five continents and covered wars and conflicts in Nigeria, Vietnam, the Middle East, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Northern Ireland, Iraq and Kuwait. His work has appeared in the world’s major magazines and he has published over 30 books.­­­­­

He has received numerous awards for his work, including the French National Order of Merit. His photographs are exhibited worldwide, and feature in numerous museum collections.

Bruno Barbey died on November 9, 2020.

Information from Magnum's website.