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:

• Animals (supported by Affinity Photo)
• Insects (supported by Nikon)
• Invertebrate Portrait (supported by Zerene Stacker)
• Butterflies & Dragonflies
• Arachnids
• Plants
• Fungi & Slime Moulds
• Intimate Landscape (supported by FRAMES)
• Studio Art (supported by Retouch4me)
• Young CUPOTY (supported by SIGMA UK) for entrants aged 17 or under.

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)

‘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.

TOPEKA, Kan. (WIBW) – A picture is worth a thousand words and a local photographer is using her platform to illustrate photography’s influence on the civil rights movement.

“I just wanted to talk about the impact that imagery has on all of us to change our minds to make us think differently, have different perceptions,” says Ann Dean, Lawrence-based photographer and member of the Humanities Kansas Speakers Bureau.

Friday’s presentation came as part of Humanities Kansas Big Idea series.

“The more things change the more they stay the same,” she says. “And you know, we’re we’re still not over the hump. We’re still fighting for the same things that we were, so we really wanted to just show that not only words can have meaning, but imagery can really have great meaning when we’re talking about these issues.”

I think it’s important to explore photography in the civil rights era because it reminds us of where we were, the intolerance, the segregation,” says Valerie Mendoza, historian and lecturer at Kansas City Kansas Community College. “And hopefully it shows us how far we’ve come.”

“In terms of photography, the civil rights era, it preserves an era [sic] with such brave people, brave and dedicated, who fought for change,” says Mendoza.

Dean used powerful historical photos to illustrate her message. You can find links and context for all of them HERE.

“It meant that the atrocities that were occurring on sometimes a daily basis in some cities in the United States could be seen by the rest of the country and the world and get a story out that perhaps wasn’t being told entirely, and allow people to make up their own ideas about what they thought of such behavior,” says Dean.

She points to the famous Whipped Peter photo and the impact it had on the public’s conscience.

“This man, with these beatings shown on his back– and I don’t I think from the very beginnings, people didn’t understand the behavior that went on along with the institution of slavery,” Dean says. “So the power was that it was able to open folks eyes to these are human beings not some commodity to be traded.”

“Sometimes when you read a story, you can read it and it sinks in. But seeing an image is worth a million of those stories, right where you see something and you think, wow,” she says.

More events from Humanities Kansas can be found on it’s website.

Copyright 2024 WIBW. All rights reserved.

The fact that Franki Raffles is so little known is a travesty. The Jewish, Marxist, lesbian, feminist photographer worked for just over a decade, until she died in 1994, aged 39, while giving birth to twin daughters. In that time she trained her lens, with brilliant fervour, on women, portraying them as gritty, resilient agents of change. Raffles’ life, her work, and her death all speak to the sheer scale of sacrifices women make and the labour they endure in trying to hold a fractured society together.

A new exhibition devoted to Raffles at the Baltic, Gateshead is the largest institutional survey of her work to date. The curators – Emma Dean and Baltic’s director, Sarah Munro – combed through more than 40,000 negatives and contact sheets in Raffles’ archive. As a result, almost none of the 300 photographs in this show have been printed before – Raffles only left a few homemade prints. They offer an unprecedented view into the scope and mission of a photographer who was almost written out of history, even as she tried to record it.

The exhibition is perfectly timed and depressingly timely, bringing the political parallels between the 1980s and now into sharp, irrefutable focus. The clothing and furnishing may date the pictures, but the same issues facing the women Raffles photographed at work in factories in Tibet or Thatcherite Scotland, or chopping wood in the USSR, or working at midwifery clinics in Zimbabwe, the low wages, the precarity, the lack of access to affordable childcare, housing or welfare, the domestic violence have barely improved, and in some cases have worsened.

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One stark difference between Raffles’ time and today, however, is the way she worked. Many of these photographs were commissioned by local authorities, intended to try to make sense of shocking statistics on social inequalities, to bolster the women’s movement. Raffles often developed her work with local councillors – a kind of comradeship that’s hard to imagine today. But it made me wonder, what might be possible now if local authorities were more forward-thinking, and if mutual trust could be forged between artists and the authorities?

Photographic projects that were exhibited in Raffles’ lifetime, such as To Let You Understand, portraying women at 40 workplaces across Edinburgh – were shown at swimming pools or leisure and community centres. Raffles didn’t consider herself an artist, nor her photographs artworks – the exhibition display here carefully takes this into account, displaying her images as constellations that gain momentum by number, giving a bird’s eye view over a society. Raffles was interested in the interconnectedness of women. She visualised intersectionality long before the term became part of the vernacular; her works find more similarities than differences between the various communities she worked alongside.

These parallels are evoked in abundance: sausages sold by women in the USSR are just like the sausages made by women in Edinburgh; women appear at the loom in Scotland and Russia; babies are born and bounced on the hip and raised in tandem with the physical labour. The women rarely stop and pose – they simply have too much to do. Raffles caught them doing back-breaking work, axes raised in the air like crucifixes, faces and hands etched with hardship, clothes stained with sweat and blood.

The exhibition presents documents of anti-poll tax protests in Scotland and anti-dictatorship protests in Manila side by side. Also included is Raffles’ best known work – an poster campaign for the charity she co-founded, Zero Tolerance, to raise awareness about domestic violence against women and children. The posters still pack a punch today with their bold typesetting and Raffles’ stark black and white photographs, both word and image subverting victim stereotypes to suggest – as one poster chillingly reads – “whoever, wherever, whenever”.

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Another prescient work that chimes with heart-rending clarity today is Lot’s Wife, a project Raffles began in the early 1990s in Israel, before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and left unfinished when she died. It compiles testimonies of Jewish women who had recently resettled in Israel after the fall of the Soviet Union, with photographs by Raffles. The women’s observations widen the aperture on the domestic space, where women are forced to grapple with the consequences of war and conflict, while thinking of the future. “I don’t want my children to grow up thinking it is all right to treat other people like this,” one woman confides.

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What makes Raffles’ sense of solidarity so convincing, perhaps, is the fact she not only photographed it, but she lived by it. When she set off on a road trip across the USSR to photograph women at work, she took her family with her – daughter Anna, then eight, and partner Sandy. She talked to her subjects at length and clearly made them feel at ease. She didn’t try – as many protest photographers now do – to make her subjects look sexy or cool. Raffles rallied and simply rolled up her sleeves and got on with the job. Yet her work was left unfinished. Just as the maxim goes: a woman’s work is never done.

Downstairs, an exhibition by Joanne Coates tells a tale of class and the countryside. Middle of Somewhere sees photographs hung on pink walls to mimic the movement of a migratory journey, as if moving up and down the contours of a rolling landscape, not unlike the places that appear in her images. Inspired by a visit to Raffles’ archive at St Andrews, Coates embarked on a new body of work that in many ways picks up where Raffles left off.

Coates set out to tell the stories of a young generation of women living on low incomes, revisiting remote rural communities on the Orkney islands and the Yorkshire Dales. Moving between enigmatic portraits and landscapes, Coates rejects the romanticised view of country living; these places are harsh, hostile and foreboding. She shows a union jack waving outside a butchers; a dead rabbit lying on an empty playing field. A solitary gravestone on a hillside is engraved with “TA-RA”. A note interrupts a picture-perfect pastoral view: “Take your bags of dog shit home.”

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In a reclaimed wooden structure, built to resemble a rural bus stop, Coates presents a short film cutting archival and new footage together, with audio accounts from young women she photographed. They speak about precarity and poverty in their communities, of the menace of the climate crisis. These are pressing concerns for the next generation living in the UK – concerns that previous generations have not had to face. The exhibition builds to a climactic cliffhanger, with two portraits of two of the young subjects, their backs now turned to the camera, contemplating the landscapes they have grown up in, but soon may be forced to leave.

• Franki Raffles: Photography, Activism, Campaign Works ends 16 March 2025. Joanne Coates: Middle of Somewhere ends 17 November 2024, both at Baltic, Gateshead