photography

Iryna Drahun’s photography is inspired not only by the artist’s post-Soviet roots, but also her interest in AI-generated imagery. With such an augmented shutter, Iryna captures not only the tangible and natural, but also creates worlds of her own which seamlessly fit into her oeuvre. Read today’s interview to learn about her inspirations, creative decisions and views of the future of art in the era of artificial intelligence.

Sessions always involve a lot of laughter. I mean, it's ridiculous what I ask people to do.” DLLCOPE, a self-described “gatherer of bodies, brains, skin, and paint to make images and sounds”, is a Canadian-based artist creating raw diorama-inspired compositions of bodies, paint, and DIY props.

“The nudity is not sexual, really. But it is physical, it is tangible.” Marie Tomanova’s intimate photographic vision has launched her into the international spotlight. In today’s feature, Marie discusses the experiences and inspirations informing her unique work, perspectives and recent book.

“The idea is to use the simple action of putting tights on and taking them off”. In exploring femininity through the symbol of nylons, Polish artist Pola Esther has started a project documenting women with (and without) this soft apparel to find a territory inbetween traditional domesticity and sexual fetishism.

Polish artist Marta Karkosa uses the medium of photography to explore contemporary women’s attitudes to their own bodies, promoting the beauty and uniqueness of every corporeal form. In today’s exclusive interview, Marta goes in-depth into her book Women Body Acceptance, which intimately explores these themes across several generations of women living in a strongly conservative nation-state.

The Netherlands-based Ukrainian photographer Alex Blanco is a seasoned visual storyteller. Her 2016-2019 project is a utopian rendering of her parents in their home city of Odessa, “where the real overlaps with the surreal and everyone was born to shine”. Holding true to this notion, she created intimate and atmospheric shots that helped her reconnect with her family.

1989. China. Czechoslovakia. One meeting place – Moscow. Linda Zhengová’s photo series captures the artist’s complicated family history. Be it living under different communist regimes thousands of kilometers apart, the inherent cultural differences, or even their eventual separation, the KULISHEK series create an intimate narrative of a family forged and fragmented in a globalizing world.

Izraeli photographer and graphic designer Omer Ga'ash creates digitally manipulated composites that treat “the place and the body as a symbiotic system.” Omer's ten-year experience with professional dancing visibly reflects in his work, via a nearly tangible understanding of the possibilities and limits of the body.

Swiss photographer Roger Weiss manipulates our stereotypical perception of bodily beauty via unusual angles and digital distortion to create sculptural, clay-like figures with accentuated and distorted extremities that invite us to untangle and sort them out in our mind. With all redundancy and personality removed, Weiss sees the flesh revert to its ancient raw symbolism.

“I think we should all be asking questions we know we will never have the answers to, because thinking about them gets you as close to the truth as possible.” The Adelaide-based photographer Joseph Häxan tells us about his fascination with biological processes, nature and the photographic medium.

Anya Miroshnichenko’s faceless female bodies challenge the typical “reading” of such “objects”. The Moscow-based artist shifts the question of representation into one of self-perception without losing the focus on family memory and intimacy.

Where does one draw the line between magical thinking and debilitating fixations? Accompanied by illustrative collages, Viktoriia Tymonova meditates on the connections between OCD, ritualism and the middle ages on a search for a “common ground between reality and fiction.”

“I prefer an imperfect but lively drawing.” Belgian native Mathieu Van Assche is adding more (perhaps mythical and ritualistic) layers of meaning to already loaded historical photographs and old masters' paintings.

The Chiméra book and photo series by Czech photographer Vladimíra Kotra is the result of a unique, close and tumultuous friendship between a photographer and someone who permitted her to document the most vulnerable moments of personal metamorphosis. Chiméra offers an intimate and delicate but also raw look into the unfolding of the male-to-female transgender identity.

Is The Brute also lurking inside you? Painter Petr Nikl and photographer Ondřej Szollos embarked on a journey to lure and woo him out in a one-of-a-kind picture essay.

SHOTBY.US, the Prague-based duo of photographers which grew tired of old orders, went to explore new dimensions of fashion editorial through a freestyle collage play.

What are our ethical and environmental responsibilities to bees? And what are their responsibilities to—and because of—us? Jake Eshelman explores our unique cohabitation with this vital insect.

Photographer Michaela Nagyidaiová captures the echoes of scars the Greek Civil War left on the landscape and in the people of one quaint village that used to be her ancestral home.

A voluminous photographic collection by Václav Jirásek documents the workers, interiors and monumentality of decaying, perishing and abandoned Czech and Moravian metallurgic works.

A keen eye of Czech artist Štěpánka Sigmundová documents the ever-changing world around her through long-term, evolving photographic series.