You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled then something has been lost.
Martha Graham
Category Archive: Americas
INTERNATIONAL: We are social creatures, but it is a characteristic with many aspects. Talking Pictures asked twelve photographic artists from around the world to consider the nature of human connection. The images they selected are as nuanced as they are diverse.
USA: Kirk Crippens explores the tension between the American Dream of home and increasing precarity – gentrification, downsizing and foreclosure – but also the haven of the unorthodox.
USA: With her unconventional mode of creation, Anne Skoogfors’ intimate botanical portraits capture the beauty and the mystery of flowers.
MEXICO: conceptual and performative images that capture the physical nature and metaphysical possibility of deserts around the world.
BRAZIL: Spectacular images that extend the concepts of time, space and perspective to explore the complex and multifarious nature of our contemporary world.
ARGENTINA: A hybrid approach to the photographic that digs deep into the complex relationship between culture and nature, decay and renewal.
USA: Repurposing their household possessions to create a mandala or build a spaceship, Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen use photography, video, performance and installation to explore the paradoxes of the American Dream.
ARGENTINA: A nocturnal explorer who seeks to communicate the richness of everyday lives and the profound histories of ordinary people.
BOLIVIA: An imaginative exploration of personal and collective identity amid the syncretic interplay of indigenous and colonising cultures of the Andes.
A real diamond is never perfect.
Anthony Doerr
USA: Meryl Meisler’s photographs capture New York City in the transformative decades of the late twentieth century, offering a rare glimpse into her extended Jewish family, the vibrant Brooklyn disco scene before gentrification, and the evolving LGBTQ+ community in the post-Stonewall era.
PERU: An artistic partnership that employs the aesthetics of art to make evident uncomfortable issues of violence, racism, and injustice that many gallery goers in Peru would rather not think about.
CANADA: Combining humour with cultural critique; history with psychology, Diana Thorneycroft constructs visual stories of the anxiety and contradiction embedded in the dark subsoil of Canadian national psyche.
Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.
Dorothy Parker
VENEZUELA: Images evoking the powerful mythologies of the indigenous peoples of the southern Americas that emphasise the interdependence of humankind and Nature.
USA: An artist whose creative practice is as feisty as it is experimental, transforming her external appearance into visual metaphors of inner dissent.
PERU: Christian Fuchs recreates his aristocratic forebears in performances for the camera that are as much psychological and metaphysical as visually mimetic.
INTERNATIONAL: Twelve reflections on the nature of Beauty by acclaimed contemporary photographers from around the world, their images and ideas as richly diverse and insightful as their individual creative practices.
MEXICO: Stories of an irrepressible archaeology and exhausted modernism; of rampant urban expansion and sublime natural grandeur.
COLOMBIA: In addressing the trauma resulting from the ongoing multilateral armed conflict in her country, Erika Diettes focuses not on violence but on bearing witness to the grief of survivors.
USA: Employing the symbolic and physical qualities of water, Wendy Sacks makes photographs that speak of the complex nature of human relationships, both light and dark.
CUBA/USA: Landscapes aesthetically reconceived as near and far, vista and texture marry in the moment.
ARGENTINA: An artist and inventor who builds cameras to capture both space and time: from brooding art deco architecture to mind-bending aerial imagery and the world’s longest continuous photographic negative.
MEXICO: Dulce Pinzón creates latter-day visual fables that address real social issues: racial prejudice, low-paid workers, environmental damage.
COLOMBIA: Vernacular imagery reconfigured to speak of the universal at the heart of the deeply personal.
USA: Meticulously crafted miniature worlds that speculate on a future without human beings.
TALKING PICTURES features in-depth interviews with photographers around the world. Conceived as a continually expanding educational resource, it is available to everyone free of charge and free of advertising.
URUGUAY: An artist, chemist, craftsman, essayist, poet, and teacher, who imbues photography with a newfound physical and philosophical dimension.
CANADA: A fifteen-year project that may well be the most extensive photographic documentation of Hutterite culture ever produced.
USA: Spanning six decades, Mariette Pathy Allen’s sensitive portraits have chronicled the transgender and non-binary community.
The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.
William Osler
USA: Ellen Jantzen uses digital imaging processes to synthesise a visual language through which to evoke the existential conundrums of our place in Nature and the impermanence of life.
INTERNATIONAL: Eleven artists and one archivist each select a photograph that speaks to them about the significance of family in its many ways of being and being understood.
PUERTO RICO: Cinematic images evoking the narrative possibilities that haunt the Caribbean night.
CANADA: Now in his ninety-sixth year, Gabor Szilasi’s photographs are remarkable not only for their visual eloquence, but for their cumulative social and historical insights.
Reality is always extraordinary
Mary Ellen Mark
ITALY/USA: From the imposing to the delicate, images assembled from thousands of nudes weaving across a panoramic field of view.
GUATEMALA: Luis González Palma grew up during thirty years of civil war, but while his images evoke sadness, they neither sentimentalise nor do they counsel despair. Rather they affirm the transcendent nature of the human spirit.
CANADA: Experimental photographic techniques that poignantly evoke the subtle grandeur and ultimate fragility of the Arctic region.
ARGENTINA: Memories of the Dirty War starkly visualised by one of the survivors of the regime’s Clandestine Centres of Detention and Torture.
CANADA: Casting a critical but amiable eye over the medium in acts of ‘becoming photography’.
PERU: Lyrical images that find a melancholy beauty in dilapidation and enfold maternal wisdom in pictorial fables.
USA: Disrupting the sedimentation of artifice through a bold juxtaposition of the vegetative with the simulation, the object with its image.
INTERNATIONAL: Eleven artists reflect on what they learned during the pandemic, picking just one thing they would reimagine for the better in the future.
AFRICA / AMERICAS: poignant imagery on a grand scale evoking the existential threat of human exploitation to both animals and people.
VIDEO: marking 150 interviews published on Talking Pictures.
MEXICO: Harnessing artificial intelligence to create photo-based images that may well come closer to the true nature human visual perception than will ever be possible with a camera.
PERU: A bird’s-eye view of Lima’s Pacific coast and inland desert revealing the delicately balanced, intimately entangled ecology below.
USA: Exploring the interplay of context and desire, and the evolving ways in which desire might be reconciled with an initially hostile environment.
Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.
Mae West
CANADA: Personal and historical trauma inspire a creative practice unafraid of the twilight world of the unconscious that lies beneath the veneer of rational civilisation.
USA: Spanning two decades, a mother and daughter explore the deep connection between people and their animal companions.
USA: Pulitzer-prize-winner Renée C Byer reveals how photography and journalism used together can catalyse action in the face of escalating inequality at home and abroad.
CANADA: a satirical retelling of familiar stories as Disney princesses, deities, and US presidents tumble into the real world like Alice in reverse.
ARGENTINA: delicate, hybrid works that speak to the fragility of life and the vulnerability we share with the planet we call home.
I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.
Imogen Cunningham
FINLAND / USA: After five decades re-imagining his body as something malleable and re-interpretable, Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s images remain as vital as those of his youth, and as refreshingly original.
CANADA: Delicate still-life images that capture a sense of tranquillity while celebrating the small and fleeting things in life.
TAIWAN / USA: Haunting images inspired by the migrant’s ongoing negotiation of memory, perception, and identity.
USA: One woman’s experience of the stifling control of a patriarchal religious fundamentalism and the processes of artmaking that helped her escape.
CHINA / USA: Delicately ambiguous self-portraits exploring the tension between freedom and boundaries, self-reflection and self-discovery.
MEXICO: Named one of the top twenty talents worldwide by FOAM magazine, Diego Moreno’s monsters have much to show us about familial love and about domestic abuse.
USA: A mother’s delicate reflections on masculinity within the everyday intimacy of family life as boys become men and men become middle-aged.
ARGENTINA: La sensibilidad de la pintura y las técnicas de la fotografía se conjugan para crear un realismo mágico irónico pero extrañamente familiar.
ARGENTINA: The sensibilities of painting and the techniques of photography blend to create an ironic but strangely familiar magic realism.
BRAZIL: Turning a compassionate eye on rural and remote medicine to capture the kindness, dedication, and empathy of healthcare workers as they transcend the most challenging circumstances.
Seeing is not as simple as looking.
Joseph Kosuth
CANADA: With well over 100,000 images and millions of possible interconnections, Luminous-Lint offers a near-infinite range of ways to pursue the study of photographic history.
USA: Patty Carroll’s ‘Anonymous Women’ parody and personify the frenetic consumerism and suffocating domesticity of ‘idealised’ notions of femininity promoted in the post-war era.
USA: Past and present converse in an archive of American life shot from a refreshingly tangential perspective.
CANADA / USA: Temporary sculptures created by balancing stones with nothing more than gravity to hold them together.
Without deviations from the norm, progress is not possible.
Frank Zappa
USA: With an emphasis on the dignity of all living things, these lo-fi collage works seek to emphasise harmony and our shared human nature, free from judgement.
MEXICO: The fluidity of domestic intimacy explored through the lens of childhood imagination and transformational community ritual.
INTERNATIONAL: Nine photographic artists from across five continents reflect on what motivates them to create photographs.
URUGUAY: Delicately poetic images printed sustainably without inks or chemicals, using naturally occurring plant materials.
USA / CANADA: A visual ethnographer, Dona Schwartz photographs expectant parents and empty-nesters marking those moments when each couple stands outside the gates of family life.
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
Gloria Steinem
MEXICO: Obscure rituals that blend the contemporary with the timeless, the personal with the collective, to suggest imaginary states and real-world paradoxes.
USA: Timeless portraits made in collaboration with the inmates of three penitentiaries in the northeast of Louisiana, the US state with the largest per capita prison population.
PERU: Art and Nature entangle the body in images that speak of the camouflage adopted by an outsider.
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus
COLOMBIA: An artist using clay figures to tell the stories of real people – stories of homelessness and social invisibility.
BRAZIL: Evocative images of the rural and indigenous peoples of this vast country, captured by one of its most distinguished visual poets.
USA: Emerging from person crisis, these images unfold a domestic conversation around the paradox of family ties and the quest for redemption.
ARGENTINA: The museum revealed as a place of haunting apparitions. Or is it we who are more truly ghosts in the museum…?
INTERNATIONAL: Impressions of Christmas and the New Year through the kaleidoscopic lens of artists from Asia, the Americas, Europe and Oceania.
LATIN AMERICA: Three Latino artists of Japanese heritage spend a month photographing in the Land of the Rising Sun. What will their images tell us about their identity?
LATINOAMÉRICA: Tres artistas latinoamericanos de origen japonés pasan un mes fotografiando la Tierra del Sol Naciente. ¿Qué nos dirán sus imágenes acerca de su identidad?
Art is not a thing;
it is a way.Elbert Hubbard
USA: Few recent cultural initiatives have had more impact in the world of photography than Houston FotoFest, with its multi-layered approach to the medium as a means to an end and not just an end in itself.
BRAZIL: a festival pioneering the use of screen-based technologies to reach out from the metropolitan art institutions to connect with communities in the poorest districts of the urban margins: to engage, to educate and to empower.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
Thomas Merton
ARGENTINA: One of the world’s longest running photographic festivals, Festival de la Luz it is both a celebration of photography as a means of enlightenment and an egalitarian meeting of diverse people and cultures.
Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
Cesar A. Cruz
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There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.
Robert Frank
EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE: Talking Pictures features in-depth interviews with photographers and photo-festival directors around the world.