Hoja Santa – Maciejka (Maya) Art (Dewi Lewis)

Maya Art’s work explores themes of femininity, religious syncretism and cultural diversity. In 2017, she spent a year in the home of Juliana, a lawyer and her teenage daughter, Veronica, in the Afro-Mexican village of Costa Chica, Oaxaca. Juliana introduced her to the women of the community who live relatively separately from the men because of a local history of violence. The work explores three main themes: the anthropology of Afro-Mexican villages, the coming together of Catholic and African spirituality, and the place of women in society

No one is ever prepared to stand in front of photographic prints by Inka and Niclas. If you haven’t seen the Human Nature exhibit at Fotografiska New York quite yet, then you’re missing out on a phenomenal experience. The room that their work is specifically in feels like something right out of Unsolved Mysteries or the X-Files. And from there, you’re compelled to want to know even more about them. Trust us, this is a rabbit hole you want to dive into.

All images by Inka and Niclas. Used with permission. Please visit their website and Instagram @inkaandniclas for more. Human Nature ends at Fotografiska New York on May 19, 2024.

It’s easy to fall in love with the work of these two. As you stare at many of their scenes, certain things just don’t seem quite right. At times, they seem foreboding. At other times, there’s an eerie sense of calm that’s hypnotizing and bewildering. A very important part of what they do involves the use of colors — which then make the mind truly question what’s in front of us. Looking at their images on a mobile device truly doesn’t do them justice. The large-screen desktop does it a bit more. But to truly feel their presence, one must experience their prints.

The Creative World of Inka and Niclas.

The duo of Inka and Niclas have quite different backgrounds. Inka (she) loved the darkroom while Niclas (he) wanted to be a ski photographer. Inka mastered old photographic processes like rubber printing, photogravure, van dyke brown, and cyanotype. Niclas, on the other hand, was an industrial photographer at a steel company. “We then met and became a couple when studying photography in the south of Sweden in our early twenties,” they tell the Phoblographer. “Ideas bounce back and forth between the two of us, one of us may present an idea and then let it go and it gets picked up by the other one years later. It’s a motion that’s been going on ever since the beginning of our collaboration back in 2007.” They’ve been working together for 17 years and they’ve got no idea what it would be like for them to work individually again.

Despite this, they’re often misinterpreting each others’ ideas. It leads them both to be content with results that are sometimes unexpected.

This series was shot on the Fujifilm GFX 50S and a GF 32-64mm F4 R LM WR lens. “The camera is a bit fiddly for our taste, but we regularly produce beautiful super sharp 120x160cm prints from the files,” the duo tells us. “It’s taken saltwater splashes, sand, rain, and -25°C temperatures over and over again without giving up on us.” The duo used to use a Nikon D800 and loves the colors of that camera more. Specifically, they state that they abused it for 6-7 years.

However, Inka and Niclas state that flashguns are a vice of theirs — currently, they’re using a Nissin i60A or the Fuji EF60. Without it, a lot of the magic in their images wouldn’t happen.

The Family Portraits Project

Inka and Niclas do all their work around the idea of humans, nature, and the camera. They’ve been working on family portraits on and off for eight years. As they progress, their creative vision changes.

‘The work is about the present-day ritual of traveling and photographing – photographs as proof to show. It’s about the depiction and consumption of grand scenery and it’s also about the camera and the magic moment of exposure.’ 

Inka and Niclas

In fact, these images are all self-portraits. Inka and Niclas photograph themselves in retroreflective suits. At first, they bounced the flash output off of the suits and straight back into the lens. This gave the feeling of them being anonymous — though it also dives into the idea of being otherworldly. How can one look at these images and not think of aliens at all?

These days, they’re not sure if that’s the sole reason why they do it. “The camera fails its duty to capture us; it erases us but leaves nature,” they state. “Us radiating with light like that also points towards some kind of energy. We see that the series has become (or perhaps was from the beginning) quite mystical, bombastic, and possibly also sinister, in a way that we appreciate.” They’ve heard tons of interpretations at this point.

They’re very big on how their work is presented as well. On social media, you truly don’t have a lot of control. On your own websites, there’s a bit more. But in person with prints, there’s a ton of control. Currently, they’re setting up a large five-room exhibit in Berlin. The due is handling the printing, framing, logistics, podiums, lighting, sound, projections, etc. They’re also working with what they describe as sculptural, non-flat photographs.

Real Photographs

“A lot of our fascination with photography lies in its unavoidable connection to a sliver of time and a place. It may seem basic, but the actual moment of exposure is still a mesmerizing concept.”

Inka and Niclas

Inka and Niclas don’t call themselves purists — but if there’s too much post-production, they feel their work falls apart. They haven’t played with AI imagery a lot, but they accept that some artists might take it on as their sole medium. “One challenge with photography is that the term is way too wide; no one discusses music in general, we need to narrow it down into subgenres much much more than what we have today.”

AUTHENTICITY STATEMENT

The Phoblographer works with human photographers to verify that they’ve actually created their work through shoots. These are done by providing us assets such as BTS captures, screenshots of post-production, extra photos from the shoot, etc. We do this to help our readers realize that this is authentically human work. Here’s what this photographer provided for us.

It’s the time of year that many of us are planning our summer getaways, packing our Nikons, naturally. So in this issue’s lead feature, intrepid photographer Iain Afshar shares his tips for getting off the beaten track and capturing your best-ever travel images. 

You don’t have to go to the ends of the earth for incredible scenic shots, though. Landscape pro Ian Asprey leads his apprentice through the Eryri (Snowdonia) national park in North Wales, where an unexpected dusting of spring snow transformed the mountains into something truly magical. 

A ‘nifty fifty’ should be in every photographer’s kit bag, and in our Big Test we rate eight FX and DX lenses with a 50mm-ish effective focal length for Z-mount Nikons, plus highlight the F-mount options that are still available. We also check out the Astrhori 25mm f/2.8 Macro 2-5x, a fun optic that renders subjects up to five times larger than life – and at a bargain price, too. And we pit the Manfrotto Befree Advanced and Novo Helix T50 travel tripods against each other. 

We speak with macro maestro Tony North about his amazing images of minibeasts and mushrooms in the N-Photo interview, while in our On Assignment section, Alfie Bowen tells how his affinity for horses helped him through tough times and set him on the road to be a wildlife photographer. 

Plus we have a plethora of projects to try your hand at, shooting reflections, festivals, birds of prey and making a party photo booth! 

N-Photo: The Nikon Magazine is a monthly magazine that’s written by Nikon enthusiasts for Nikon enthusiasts, you can be sure that all the content is 100% relevant to you! So for the best Nikon-focused news, reviews, projects, and a whole lot more, subscribe to N-Photo today – with our unmissable subs deal!

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Venezuelans wave a US flag at a television helicopter flying over the Rio Grande, in Matamoros, Mexico, on Friday 12 May 2023, a day after pandemic-related asylum restrictions called Title 42 were lifted

Photograph: Fernando Llano/AP

In 2018, a friend of photographer Stefanie Belnavis asked her to do a maternity shoot. The friend, dancer and doctor Sade Bully-Bell, was towards the end of her pregnancy and wanted photos to remember the moment. Belnavis shot photos of Bully-Bell in Boston’s Fens area. “There was a lot of high grass,” says Belnavis. “You couldn’t even tell that we were shooting in Boston.

Weeks later, Bully-Bell gave birth. Tragically, the baby, named Isaiah, was stillborn. “This one hit me hard because I realized the people who I knew — who’d been pregnant — nobody really talked about adverse experiences,” says Belnavis.

Belnavis, who is also a licensed mental health clinician and a perinatal movement psychotherapist, was inspired to start Birthlooms, a photography project that captures moments during the prenatal, labor, child birth and postpartum period, both “joyous and complex.” Birthlooms focuses specifically on Black and brown birthing people. Since starting the project, Belnavis has photographed around 40 different families. “If you look at birth photography, it’s very glamorized, which I’m not against,” she says. “But I felt like there was a whole sector of the perinatal experience that was missing visually.”

The experience before, during and after birth can look very different for birthing people of color. Black, American Indian and Alaska Native birthing people have higher rates of pregnancy-related death compared to white women, and are also less likely to access pre-natal care earlier on in pregnancy. Infants born to birthing people of color also have higher mortality rates. 

“For example, Black Maternal Health Week just passed, and you see the statistics for Black birthing people,” says Belnavis. “But how do we broaden that beyond just the hashtag? How do you even start those conversations?”

I felt like there was a whole sector of the perinatal experience that was missing visually.

Stefanie Belnavis

Through Birthlooms, and working with clients during all stages of the perinatal journey, Belnavis begins that important dialogue. Belnavis has a background as a board-certified dance movement psychotherapist and worked as an early childhood mental health clinician — she utilizes those skills as she builds relationships with her subjects. “As a somatic practitioner, as somebody who loves to be in relationship with people, who loves to celebrate their stories, I came at it from a different lens,” she says. “There is a therapeutic component.”

For Nyacko Pearl Perry, an organization development consultant and co-founder of Comfort Kitchen in Dorchester, working with Birthlooms for her maternity shoot was an essential experience. Belnavis photographed Perry in 2022, a few months before Perry gave birth to her son.

“I felt very held and heard through the process,” says Perry. “She was always very centered towards me, and [asking] how am I doing and how am I feeling.”

Before giving birth to her son, Perry went through a miscarriage. “It just went from there’s a heartbeat to there’s no longer heartbeat… It was pretty horrific,” Perry explains. She recalls her doctor being cold and distant, not emotionally available to help support her through a difficult time.

As a birthing person of color, Perry was keenly away of the health disparities she faced. When she became pregnant a second time, Perry says that there were moments when she felt like a “walking statistic…  I didn’t have a lot of trust in the hospital to give me the emotional support I needed.”

Some of that support Perry found in Birthlooms. Being photographed by Belnavis was a way to solidify and memorialize the beauty of pregnancy while acknowledging the impact of her previous loss. Belnavis shared informational resources with Perry while helping her generate a list of items needed once the baby was born. “She just has an awareness and a sensitivity to all the experiences related to pregnancy and bereavement,” says Perry.

Feeling seen and held, as Perry describes it, is incredibly important for birthing people of color who are already facing silos in healthcare. “I hope that individuals who have shared experiences around birth bereavement or grief or loss… that they feel represented and that they also get to experience liberation in the process,” says Belnavis.

It’s not just about the photographs for Belnavis. She describes her practice as a co-journey,  not only with Black and brown birthing people but birth workers as well. Belnavis’ photos help provide and build out a visual context for what the perinatal journey looks like. “I want to amplify representation within the perinatal photography space and also, evoke more conversation and advocacy.”

Birthlooms has even made Belnavis rethink her own mother’s birthing journey. “I learned, since the pandemic, that my two sisters were delivered by our family doctor, but I was delivered by a midwife,” Belnavis says. “I didn’t know that all these years. What was that experience like, giving birth with a midwife in 1980s Jamaica? It just prompts a lot more conversation, which I think is exciting and very much needed.”

Belnavis plans to continue to expand Birthlooms in ways that allow her to share and highlight the stories of the people she photographs, with hopes for more workshops and a potential summit in the near future. She also has a private practice called A Bucket for the Well that is “a perinatal creative wellness practice where I provide perinatal mental health support and movement psychotherapy support for Black and brown birthing folks and also birth workers.”

For Belnavis, Birthlooms has opened up an entire world of possibility. “I just want to continue empowering Black and brown birthing folks to honor their stories.”

Belnavis hosts a portrait pop-up for Mother’s Day on Sunday, May 12 at Emerald City Plant Shop.