The Time Captured project uses an oak barrel in which Don Q Gran Reserva XO was aged to convert it into a traditional large-format film camera, capturing images of the rum-making and aging processes.

Amid times when technology dominates, Don Q, the iconic rum produced by Destilería Serrallés, has established an innovative collaboration with Puerto Rican photographer Jochi Melero to capture photos with the only camera-barrel in the world, which was built on the island.

In an era where technology prevails, Don Q, the iconic rum produced by Destilería Serrallés, has initiated an innovative collaboration with Puerto Rican photographer Jochi Melero. Together, they have captured photos using the world’s only camera-barrel, which was constructed on the island.

The “Time Captured” project uses an oak barrel in which Don Q Gran Reserva XO was aged to convert it into a traditional large-format film camera, capturing images of the rum-making and aging processes.

The campaign is inspired by the history of photography: The dark space inside a classic camera captured a moment in time, preserving and highlighting its beauty. Similarly, the oak barrel enhances the distinctive color, aroma and flavor of the rum, while preserving its unique character over time.

Jochi Melero
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“With this effort, we celebrate the art of rum-making while paying homage to the history and tradition of photography, very similar processes that require time and patience to achieve extraordinary results,” Destilería Serrallés CEO Philippe Brechot said.

“Our Don Q Gran Reserva XO is one of those that make up our portfolio of premium rums that mixes rums aged between 9 and 12 years and Solera rums of more than 55 years,” he said.

“For more than 157 years, we have produced the No. 1 rum in Puerto Rico with careful and artisanal processes to serve our customers in a unique way and offer the best rum from the island around the world,” he added.

The “Time Captured” campaign is an innovative approach for Destilería Serrallés that shows the brand’s commitment to quality and craftsmanship, honoring the heritage and history of making Puerto Rican rum.

“This effort inspired me to reflect on how the inherent life of objects can emanate their own intelligence and evolve through time,” Melero said.

“Being able to provide the barrel of rum with the mechanical eye of a camera to give it vision, its function of caring and giving it characteristics to rum is transformed to make way for the visual. It is a project that perfectly merges two arts that will always remain in the visual poetry of our island,” he added.

This story was written by our staff based on a press release.

KOCHI, India, April 24, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Khanh Phan Thi from Vietnam has won the 14th edition of Greenstorm Global Photography Award. The award was presented in an online event held on Earth Day, 22nd April. She carries home 1000 USD as Cash Prize and a Certificate.

Her spectacular entry was chosen by an eminent jury and through a public poll participated by thousands of photography enthusiasts and laypeople from all over the world.

This year’s award saw a whopping 4183 entries submitted by photographers from 75 countries, including the USA, UAE, UK, Canada, India, Algeria, Brazil, Iran, Malaysia, South Korea, Morocco, Vietnam, etc. The theme for this year’s international award participation was ‘In Harmony with Nature’.

Khanh’s winning entry is a picture of a storm in the dry season at the Lap An lagoon in Hue province of Vietnam. She felt that heaven and earth seemed to be connected by wind and water. While talking from Ho Chi Minh City after accepting the award, Khanh said, “Every photo tells a story, and every story has the power to change the world.“

“The beauty of nature has to be seen and projected, that’s when people would say we want to protect nature. Events like these celebrate the beauty of nature through the power of creative visuals,” said Dr Muralee Thummarukudy, Director of the G20 Global Initiative on Land, United Nations, Bonn, Germany, while inaugurating the award ceremony. “Land is the platform for all of biodiversity, land is where most of the impacts of climate change are seen, land is the home of 99.9 per cent of humanity. Still, the land is not getting the attention it deserves,” he said.

Amar Habeeb from Abu Dhabi, UAE, was selected as the Jury Choice. His photograph depicts an artistic top shot of a mangrove with interspersed estuaries resembling a tree with its broad trunk and many branches. In addition, Yuri Pritisk from Russia, Soumya Ranjan Bhattacharyya and Kishore Das from West Bengal, India, were awarded special mentions. The winners carry home a Cash Award of 1800 USD collectively and certificates.

“The images we see through the brilliant lenses of the participants evoke emotions, inspire action and make us more aware of our planet’s beauty and fragility,” said Dileep Narayanan, Managing Trustee of the Greenstorm Foundation. Dr Krishnakumar Mechoor Festival Director, CA George Korah Trustee, Santhosh Thannikkat, Executive Council member, also spoke along with the winners.

The 14th edition of Greenstorm Global Photography Award featured 30 finalist entries by a jury composed of Mr Chet Kamat, Dr Lathika Nath, Mr Nick Hall and Mr Sharad Haksar. Visitors to the website voted online for their favourite image, and the winners were chosen by the jury marks and by the number of popular votes garnered.

About Greenstorm Foundation

Greenstorm Foundation is a Global Creative Conservancy formed to impact an appropriate attitudinal shift toward environment conservation among the youth. Using the remarkable power of creativity, this green initiative from Kerala has reached 75 nations worldwide and has inspired over 12 million young minds since its inception in 2009. The Greenstorm initiative began as a CSR initiative of Organic BPS, a brand-purpose consultancy.

Greenstorm Foundation is a registered (not-for-profit) public trust in Kochi, India. Anil K Menon, Dileep Narayanan and George Korah are the trustees of the Foundation. Over these years, Greenstorm has also won many major national and international awards, including the IAA Olive Crown Award in 2018 and 2023, the KMA CSR Award 2020, the NIB Award 2017 for the Best CSR Activation, the Social Media Campaign of the Year 2018 recognition by the Public Relations Council of India and the Gold Medal in the Pepper Awards 2018 for Best Photography.

Website: www.greenstorm.green

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2061194/Khanh_Phan_Thi_Photograph.jpg

SOURCE Greenstorm Foundation

Alexi Lubomirski has a natural ability to put the people he photographs at ease. “I have to find out who they are and who they need me to be for the day. Do I sense they want to be treated with the utmost respect… or that they like rude jokes?” he says with a smile. “When they feel like I’ve heard them and I understand them, trust is born.” His thoughtful approach, combined with deep camera skills and legendary charm (not to mention dashing good looks), has made Lubomirski the favourite photographer of the world’s most notable celebrities. He is drawn to images where his subjects appear at their happiest and, during his two-decade career, he has captured countless famous faces – including this month’s cover star Elle Fanning – in soft moments of reflection or peals of laughter.

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The son of a Peruvian-English mother and a Polish prince, Lubomirski only learnt of his aristocratic heritage at the age of 11, while living in Botswana – the same year his stepfather gave him his first camera, a discovery that enthralled him rather more. “I found the joy of taking pictures of friends, trying to show them in their best light,” he says. He returned to the UK to study for an art foundation degree at the University of Brighton, specialising in fashion, before moving to Paris in 1999, where he worked as Mario Testino’s assistant for four years. Subsequently, he began building his portfolio as a celebrity photographer, with early shoots featuring Renée Zellweger, Naomie Harris and Cate Blanchett.

Sienna Miller photographed by Lubomirski for Harper’s Bazaar’s April 2017 issue

In 2018, he was commissioned to take Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s official engagement and wedding photos, as well as portraits of King Charles and Camilla, the Queen Consort. In these, Lubomirski captures the more intimate side of a family usually portrayed in formal set-ups. One shot, for example, shows Charles mid-chortle, while Camilla’s hand rests on his knee. “What I noticed with the two of them is that, when nobody was looking, they would just be whispering to each other, smiling and laughing. It was like watching a new boyfriend and girlfriend,” he says.

An Olivia Colman portrait taken for Harper’s Bazaar in 2019

His long-standing relationship with Bazaar has seen him shoot many covers, including those featuring Olivia Colman, Lupita Nyong’o and Jennifer Aniston – all set to appear in his forthcoming book of 113 portraits, The Sittings (2003-2023). Julia Roberts, with whom he has built a particular rapport, has written the foreword. “Julia creates this familial vibe onset,” he reflects. “When I do the lightest, I’ll say something to make her laugh, take the frame and wait for two seconds while the image travels through the wires and comes onto the computer screen beside the clients. I will listen, and 100 per cent of the time, I hear this ‘Oh!’ – this collective joyous sigh– because of that smile.”

Lupita Nyong’o captured by Lubomirski for Harper’s Bazaar’s May 2015 issue

While he was working with Lupita Nyong’o, he learnt that she loves to dance – so he decided to blast Prince songs from the studio speaker system. “I started dancing behind the camera, like a dad at a wedding. She began to move, too, and the whole crew lit up,” he recalls. “Once that mood is set, you can carry it on for the rest of the day.”

To coincide with the release of The Sittings, Lubomirski is curating an exhibition of his works at Claridge’s Art Space with Bazaar’s creative director Tom Usher, so that visitors will have a chance to look at his portraits up close. “That’s the thing with being an artist,” he says. “It’s not just about creating the work. You want to share it with other people so that, hopefully, they will feel the same emotion from it as you do.”

Viola Davis photographed for Harper’s Bazaar in 2022

by Alexi Lubomirski is published on 24 April. All proceeds will be donated to Concern Worldwide. The exhibition will run at Claridge’s Art Space from 24 April to 15 May

Madison professional portrait photographer Shalicia Johnson was recently among the 15 portrait photographers selected to exhibit their artwork at The Pharmacy Gallery Art Space in Springfield, Illinois, during a one-night-only display.

“I was elated. I felt so valued and seen and accomplished to see my artwork up in the gallery with international works and national works of art and local works of art,” Johnson tells Madison365. “It felt really really good to have my work seen and chosen on its merits. So I’m super happy.”

Shalicia Johnson, owner of ArrowStar Photography, is a well-known photographer in Madison who is highly visible at many community celebrations and events. Her photography artwork was chosen from over 200 images submitted by photographers hailing from the United States and Canada. The images were selected by a panel of seasoned professional photographers based on the level of excellence they demonstrated.

“I was stunned by the quality of submissions for this prestigious event. That Shalicia’s was chosen among so many outstanding applicants is a true testament to the excellence she has achieved as a boutique portrait photographer,” said Sarah Petty, photography business coach and host of the event, in a statement.

The Pharmacy Gallery Art Space is a premier art space in the capital city of Illinois, featuring a wide range of contemporary artwork from local, national and international artists. Over 100 photographers attended the formal reception on April 12.

Johnson’s exhibit photo was of an adorable dog named JoJo whose picture came from a competition that Johnson hosts every year where she raises money for a charitable cause. It’s called the Pooch Playoffs 2023, a March Madness-style tournament fundraiser for dogs and dog lovers.

“Very few pet portraits are chosen for this particular gallery exhibit. But, yes, she was one of the 44 dogs that I photographed for Pooch Playoffs 2023,” Johnson says. “I raised $4,400 for my charity, which was Not One More Vet, Inc., a nationwide organization for mental health support and suicide prevention for the veterinarian community because the suicide rate among veterinarians is very, very high.

“I love the photo of JoJo because she just has this really wistful look on her face. And I actually did an oil painting effect in Photoshop on that particular image and so you can see it when it’s up close,” Johnson continues. “I randomly chose JoJo just because she had this gorgeous longing look on her face.” 

The opportunity to be featured at Pharmacy Gallery Art Space arose out of a coaching community that Johnson has been a member of for quite some time.

“We have an in-person training with our coach …we call it immersion. So there’s a spring immersion and a fall immersion,” Johnson says. “And for the last night of our spring immersion this year, our coach said, ‘Hey, guess what? We have this idea and we are going to have your artwork exhibited at this gallery. And so they’re going to be a few people selected. And so if you’re interested, submit up to three images.’”

Three people from the coaching program assessed each piece of artwork on its technical merits without knowing who submitted the image.

“Out of 200 submissions, they chose 15 works of art. And the gallery was going to allow space for 15 pieces of artwork to go up for a one-night-only showing,” Johnson says. 

Each image featured at least one person or pet and exemplified the skill and creativity of the artists selected. The show was sponsored by White House Custom Color (WHCC), a leading provider of photographic printing and professional photography products.

“We were able to tell White House Custom Color, which is a professional lab we use who actually sponsored the event, the size we wanted, the material we wanted, the kind of paper we wanted … that kind of thing,” Johnson says. “So I chose a bamboo panel with fine art photo rag metallic paper. It’s something I haven’t had before. And then White House [Custom Color] took care of it.

“And so this was a really cool experience for our class. We’ve never gotten to see everybody dressed up and all fancy because we see each other on Zoom every day of the week,” Johnson adds. “Because with our coaching program, everything is virtual, so we only get to see each other twice a year in person and this time we all had heels on and the guys had ties on … and so this ended up being an amazing experience. The president of the gallery was there and she said that we were the most fun group that they’d ever had at the gallery.”

Johnson’s incredible experience being featured in an international art gallery exhibition came just a few days after she officially launched herself as a fully self-employed, full-time photographer. It was a little scary because that meant quitting her day job. So while ArrowStar Photography began as a side business back in 2017; now she is delving into photography full-time. It’s a tribute to how far she has come in just six years.

“It makes me really proud of myself for making this leap. I never really thought of myself as an entrepreneur, even in the last almost six years I’ve been running my business, but I am now embracing the fact that I am a full-time entrepreneur and that I can live out my dreams and live my life the way I want to,” Johnson says. “I’m so excited about it.

“I’m very excited for my future and what I’ll be able to do through my portraiture because I do a lot of philanthropy through my portraiture, so I’m really excited to see how I can help the next organization through my work and I’m excited about being able to travel and do the things I love with the people that I love,” Johnson continues. “So I couldn’t be happier for where I am in my life right now and I appreciate all of the people who have supported me on this journey.”

Born in the US to Ukrainian parents, Katherine Turczan grew up on a farm near the town of Paterson in New Jersey. “It only took three ballerina-like leaps to cross the lawn and reach my grandfather’s screen door,” she writes in her new photo book, From Where They Came, which features evocative monochrome portraits made in Ukraine between 1991 and 2008.

As a child, Turczan had listened intently to her grandfather’s stories of the country he had fled in the wake of the second world war. “My whole family were storytellers,” says Turczan, “and they created vivid descriptions of the life they had left behind. But my grandfather’s were the most vivid.” He told her how he had been wounded fighting the Bolsheviks, how his brother had died of typhoid during the conflict, and how he had made his way to the US, leaving behind his parents and siblings. As he talked, he would often sketch the remembered likenesses of his lost family members on scraps of paper torn from Svoboda, or Freedom, a newspaper for Ukrainian exiles.

Throughout her childhood, Turczan’s cultural links with her family’s homeland were strong: she attended Saturday school to learn Ukrainian and was part of a Ukrainian-American girls’ scout troupe – but it was her grandfather who was her most important influence. With hindsight, she sees a deep connection between the drawing lessons her grandfather gave her as a child – “his careful direction to observe things closely” – and her quiet, but penetrating, photographic gaze. “He was a folk artist, who worked on the railroads,” she says. “He collected roadkill, birds and squirrels, which he would hang on our barn door with old toys, wire and driftwood to make interesting compositions. Occasionally I would draw these still lifes. I had a long childhood of looking.”

In the summer of 1991, Turczan travelled to Ukraine for the first time, supported by a grant from Yale University. Her grandfather had died and both her parents had just been diagnosed with early stage dementia. “Looking back, I really did not know how to grapple with it all,” she says, quietly. “But I had always imagined what my life would have been like had my family stayed there.”

Her first, uncertain trip to her family’s homeland coincided with an attempt by hardline Soviet communists to oust Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russian reformist leader, in what became known as the August Coup. The attempted coup failed and, four months later, the USSR began to fragment. The Ukraine that Turczan held in her imagination from so many family stories, many of them marked by war and tragedy, was suddenly, almost unbelievably, an independent country with a palpable sense, as she puts it, “of things loosening up”.

From Where They Came, her collection of images, is the end result of her many subsequent visits to Ukraine over the following two decades. It is a deeply personal undertaking: portraits of the extended family she met there – the uncles, aunts, cousins she had heard so much about as a child. “I began in Lviv by contacting family I had there who are musicians and quite well known,” she says. “They completely understood what I was doing, and I began living with them.”

From there, she made contact with two other branches of her extended family, but also made portraits of other people she encountered and was instinctively drawn to. They included Orthodox nuns, whose convents were supported by donations from exiled Ukrainians, and the children of Chornobyl who attended secular summer camps far away from the zones of contamination caused by the 1986 nuclear disaster. “I was interested in women and children,” she says. “Women held the households together and the children were often the innocent victims of one tragedy after another.”

Her images are not tragic. But with their poised, quiet presence, they inevitably exude a melancholy sadness given the destruction wreaked by Russia’s invasion. They evoke a place that seems almost pre-modern, the sense of bucolic calmness now loaded with the weight of history. “It did feel to me then that the world I encountered on those early trips had not advanced in 30 or 40 years. Which in a way was true. The view is gentle and one of the main reasons to show the pictures now is to balance the dreadful images of horror and suffering coming out of Ukraine.”

Nevertheless, you cannot look at these images without wondering what has happened to the people in them. When I mention this, Turczan draws my attention to a portrait of a young girl in a car who, it turns out, is her cousin. Since the invasion, she has lived in Poland. They were reunited in Berlin last Christmas.

Turczan has made the aesthetic choice to present her images uncaptioned and her subjects unnamed. “What I like about it,” she says, “is that you are not distracted by all that information.” She uses a large format, 8×10 camera that is “a labour of love requiring patience and time” as well as “talking and negotiation” between her and her subjects.” Formally, her portraits have a similar aura to those of the great Judith Joy Ross, who, it turns out, encountered Turczan’s work at Yale and encouraged her with the project. “She is one of my heroes,” says Turczan, who also counts Andrea Modica and Lois Conner among her influences. “I like fearless women travelling alone with big cameras,” she says, laughing.

When she first arrived in Ukraine, she recalls that one of her relatives, on seeing her camera, said: “I wish you were a writer.” The inference was that a photograph could not go as deep into history, memory and human experience as a story. “I think there are different things that photography can do,” she counters. “My images are essentially a reflection of my own complex family history as well as my relationship to a country that, before I went there, was based on received information – so much so that, when I did go there for the first time, I felt like I was returning.”

• From Where They Came is available from Stanley/Barker