Eskimo Kisses Photography in Athens celebrated one year of business with a ribbon cutting on Friday hosted by the Greater Valley Chamber of Commerce. Eskimo Kisses Photography specializes in a variety of styles of photography and offers on location and in studio photoshoots for portraits, families, and more. Pictured from left to right are GVCC board member Carrie Henry, Athens Borough Mayor Francis “Skipp” Roupp, GVCC President Kim Mastrantonio, Owner of Eskimo Kisses Photography Jackie Kingsley, GVCC board member Michelle Simonds, Assistant Mackenzie Brown, and GVCC Executive Director Jan Lee. Eskimo Kisses Photography is located at 420 South Main Street in Athens.
Launched in 2014, PhotoSparks is a weekly feature from YourStory, with photographs that celebrate the spirit of creativity and innovation. In the earlier 770 posts, we featured an art festival, cartoon gallery. world music festival, telecom expo, millets fair, climate change expo, wildlife conference, startup festival, Diwali rangoli, and jazz festival.
The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in Saket, New Delhi, is wrapping up a four-month exhibition of Raghu Rai, titled A Thousand Lives: Photographs from 1965-2005. Rai is a critically-acclaimed photographer, photojournalist and author.
Going through the exhibition is like travelling through a time-tunnel of Indian history, and also experiencing a masterclass on the art and science of photography. See our earlier coverage of KNMA exhibitions here.
The black-and-white images from the ‘analog’ era capture scenes through the mists of time, and reflect the aesthetics and techniques of the pre-digital years. The current exhibition focuses on Rai’s black-and-white collected works.
KNMA has been pioneering shows on modern and contemporary South Asian art since 2010, and has galleries in New Delhi and Noida. It also runs educational and public-focused programmes and brings out a series of publications.
The museum has an in-house collection of more than 10,000 artworks. Its activities are spearheaded by philanthropist Kiran Nadar and supported by the Shiv Nadar Foundation. In 2025, KNMA plans to open its new standalone museum building.
Curated by Roobina Karode, the current exhibition features Raghu Rai, who was born in what is now Pakistan. He studied civil engineering before switching to photography. He was at The Statesman newspaper, Sunday news magazine, and Magnum Photos.
Rai was awarded the Padma Shri in 1972 for his work on the liberation war of Bangladesh and its refugees. Other prestigious awards would come his way from the French government as well.
His works have been exhibited across India and overseas–in Spain, Australia, France, Italy, Netherlands, and Finland. He is currently based in Delhi. In Part II of this photo essay, we will feature insights from Rai and Karode.
From religion and politics to landscapes and daily life, Rai’s camera seems to have covered it all. The photographs are inspiring and endearing in the way that they capture scenes as living theatre.
Now what have you done today to pause in your busy schedule and harness your creative side for a better world?
(All photographs were taken by Madanmohan Rao on location at the exhibition.)
BENTONVILLE — Kristine Potter: Dark Waters, an exhibition of richly detailed black-and-white photographs, opens to the public at the Momentary today.
The photographs, mainly landscapes and portraits, are supported by a video and sound installation and are “inspired by enigmatic terrain surrounding bodies of water that bear names of violence in the American South, places like ‘Murder Creek,’ ‘Deadman’s Branch,’ and ‘Bloody Fork,'” according to a press release.
“These are absolutely beautiful photographs, and you’re going to be swept away by them,” said Alejo Benedetti, Momentary curator of contemporary art.
The exhibition is on view through Oct. 13. Potter, the artist, is the grand prize winner of the 2023 Hariban Award and an assistant professor of photography at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tenn.
Dark Waters is accompanied by Potter’s second monograph, co-published by the Momentary and Aperture magazine, but isn’t exactly like it, Benedetti promised.
“To translate that from a book you hold and look at into an exhibition that you’re going to experience is … truly a transition,” he said. “It’s an exhibition that you’re not just going to see, you’re going to feel.”
Potter was present during a press preview Friday to introduce her works and kept her comments brief, saying it’s best to experience the art first. Next to the works are numbers, rather than traditional placards, to allow visitors to experience them and let it bring up their own associations before adding in someone else’s, she explained.
The opening area of Dark Waters is meant to feel a bit like an open mic night at a hole-in-the-wall honky tonk, Potter said. Each of the people performing in the video screened are men, and they’re all casually singing “murder ballads,” songs in which women are killed and left in rivers and forests.
“It’s not meant to be anachronistic; it’s mostly to make you think about how much entertainment you actually engage in that recounts a kind of gendered violence,” Potter said, using the example of TV shows, films, true crime podcasts, stories of abuse and violence against women, which she described as a part of our cultural diet. “The work is responding to the cumulative effect of the kinds of stories we tell about place and how particularly for women that contributes to how we experience place.”
Potter is a photographer who typically works regionally, but she’s interested in the mythology of the U.S., the stories Americans tell about themselves, as well as the archetypes of masculinity.
When she began working in the South, she became interested in the history of violence in the southern landscape. Potter oriented herself to the topic by using the bodies of water with ominous names, wondering how something like “Murder River” got, and kept, its name.
Potter began photographing for the project in 2015 and prints everything herself, she said. The resulting works — taken in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, North Carolina and South Carolina — are not journalistic in answer but rather “lyrical documentary form” and focus on how the settings make the viewer feel.
An attendee looks on at photographs Friday during a media preview for Kristine Potter’s Dark Waters photo exhibit at The Momentary in Bentonville. The exhibition is a collection of black-and-white photographs inspired by the enigmatic terrain surrounding bodies of water that bear names of violence in the American South, places like Murder Creek, Deadman’s Branch and Bloody Fork. The series of photographs, supported by a video and sound installation, unravels the deeply held associations between land and violence in this area of the nation. Visit nwaonline.com/photos for today’s photo gallery. (NWA Democrat-Gazette/Charlie Kaijo)
An attendee looks on at photographs Friday during a media preview for Kristine Potter’s Dark Waters photo exhibit at The Momentary in Bentonville. The exhibition is a collection of black-and-white photographs inspired by the enigmatic terrain surrounding bodies of water that bear names of violence in the American South, places like Murder Creek, Deadman’s Branch and Bloody Fork. The series of photographs, supported by a video and sound installation, unravels the deeply held associations between land and violence in this area of the nation. Visit nwaonline.com/photos for today’s photo gallery. (NWA Democrat-Gazette/Charlie Kaijo)
An attendee looks on at photographs Friday during a media preview for Kristine Potter’s Dark Waters photo exhibit at The Momentary in Bentonville. The exhibition is a collection of black-and-white photographs inspired by the enigmatic terrain surrounding bodies of water that bear names of violence in the American South, places like Murder Creek, Deadman’s Branch and Bloody Fork. The series of photographs, supported by a video and sound installation, unravels the deeply held associations between land and violence in this area of the nation. Visit nwaonline.com/photos for today’s photo gallery. (NWA Democrat-Gazette/Charlie Kaijo)
The sixth edition of the Close-Up Photographer of the Year competition will once again have an underwater category.
The aim of the annual competition is to reveal the hidden wonders of the world through close-up, macro and micro photography.
In addition to underwater, the 10 other categories include:
The final deadline for submissions is July 14th, 2024, while the early bird deadline (save 10% on the entry fee) is on May 31, 2024.
The top prize gets £2,500 (~US$3,131/~€2,906) cash, a trophy along with a universal license for all three Affinity apps.
The total prize fund for this year has been boosted to almost £9,000 (~US$11,272/~€10,460), with each category winner taking home £250 (~US$313/~€291), plus a universal license for all three Affinity apps (Photo, Designer + Publisher) for macOS, Windows and iPadOS.
The Young Close-up Photographer of the Year will receive a SIGMA 105mm F2.8 DG DN MACRO Art lens, a universal license for all three Affinity apps and a trophy.
Software creator Retouch4me will award a Dust, Color Match and Portrait Volumes plug-in to the first-, second- and third-placed photographers in the new Studio Art category. A subscription to FRAMES magazine and community will go to the Intimate Landscape winner.
The Top 100 images selected by an expert jury will appear in the winners’ gallery as a permanent exhibition on the CUPOTY website. The judging panel for CUPOTY 6 (so far) includes world-class photographers, magazine journalists, conservationists and authors: Karine Aigner, Nigel Atherton, Sue Bishop, Tracy Calder, Jaime Culebras, Matt Doogue, Guy Edwardes, Wim van Egmond, Tom Gilks, Viktoria Haack, Brendan “Cygnus” James, David Maitland, Bart “@insectguru” Somers, Georgina Steytler, Rachael Talibart, Tomasz Trzebiatowski and Keith Wilson.
To enter, go to cupoty.com.
(Featured Image © Liang Fu | cupoty.com)
MURPHYSBORO — To celebrate 15 years in business and expanding into a new building, Whimsey Photography held a ribbon cutting Thursday.
On May 9, 2009, Nichole Smelter had her first photoshoot for Whimsey Photography.
‘Incredible’: Photographer describes images of auroras over Maine
A series of solar flares and coronal mass ejections from the sun are creating dazzling auroras across the globe. Photographer Benjamin Williamson shares the vibrant pictures he captured in Maine.
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In a quiet corner of Camberwell, south London, palm tree fronds shade an intricately tiled pond of Islamic design. This hidden oasis, named Chumleigh Gardens, was created in 1995 to reflect the multiculturalism of the local inhabitants. Nearby stand the ruins of a 19th-century limestone kiln, which was used to smelt chalk into quicklime to light London’s theatres before the invention of electricity.
Chalk and palm trees, both of which appeared in the fossil record of the Cretaceous period, are close to my heart. I grew up in Argentina, surrounded by palm-lined parks, and as a child I remember visiting family on the Dorset coast, collecting fossils on the beach.
Here, I bring Chumleigh’s palm trees together with silver-gelatin prints of my grandfather, a Jewish émigré to Argentina. His self-portraits in front of palm trees attest to the kinship he felt with these gentle giants: both tall, alien species in a new city. I’ve used chalk to rub the photographic collage, leaving my fingerprints on the corners of the image, as a record of my encounter with deep time.
When I was a child, we would travel from Slough into London to visit family. Driving along the Hammersmith flyover, I would look out for the giant boat-shaped building. I was blown away by the scale. Back home, I felt I could almost see the glass towers glistening from a distance. Now I know that enormous building as The Ark, a block of offices.
When I finally arrived in the capital, I got an internship, endlessly archiving images from magazines and arranging taxis to photography studios. I saw the gap between my fantasy of London and real life. I began to pay attention to the surfaces of the city, to the glossy facades of the skyscrapers, spreading from Vauxhall to Canary Wharf, which had so impressed me.
In making this commission, I thought a lot about the philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s 1974 book The Production of Space, and the way capitalism shapes space in London. I made images of the city’s architecture and used industrial processes like laser cutting and UV printing to make them into a modular sculpture.
The pieces form a house of cards-style structure, beautiful but brittle. Like the glass buildings that seemed to glimmer back at me as a child, light bounces off the images of metal and glass. London can feel so solid, almost a part of the natural world. In this work, I attempted to make the unseen processes of production visible.
Adulthood started for me at 18, when I moved to London. It’s been my home now for more than 21 years, longer than I lived in my motherland of Poland. For my partner Pani, it’s been 14 years since he emigrated from Australia. The city has become not just the place where we found our identities as photographers, but a part of us, too.
We began photographing young adults because we wanted to imagine what it might have looked like had we been teenagers here. It’s a nostalgic impulse: we’re trying to see parts of ourselves and the friends we grew up with in others.
London is vast, which gives its different communities the space to breathe, but it’s also wildly populous. People from disparate backgrounds end up stacked on top of one another (usually in harmony). In this series, shot in a skate park in Hackney with local friends, we wanted to explore the city’s ability to embrace these differences.
There’s something so effortless about how cool and ahead of the curve they are, not just their dress but in their attitudes. They look directly into the lens of the camera with complete ease. By Lola Paprocka
Lola & Pani will be exhibiting as part of this year’s Photo London’s Discovery
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