The 300SL, a revered classic and arguably the quintessential Mercedes that resonates with fans far beyond the brand’s devout followers. Imagine my thrill when I had the chance to photograph this iconic car at Budapest’s renowned Heroes Square. Join me on this brief, almost utopian adventure.

Meet Zoli, affectionately known as “Gullwing Zoli” in our circles. Known on Instagram as classic.race, Zoli resides in Germany. He’s not only a wonderful person with a generous heart but also possesses profound knowledge and experience with classic cars. He works with HK Engineering’s Race division, where he builds, maintains, and manages rentals for their race cars.

One of Hungary’s largest car shows, AMTS, was Zoli’s chosen venue to showcase the Race SL300. We occasionally chat, so I learned about his plans quite early and couldn’t resist saying, “Sorry, but it would be foolish to miss this chance to showcase that this car has visited Budapest.” It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Thankfully, Zoli, true to his kind nature, agreed. Despite little sleep and a long drive back to Germany looming, he met me and my camera at dusk at the majestic Heroes Square.

I’ll let the photographs tell the rest of the story. Enjoy!

Photos: Peter Mosoni

An Asian woman poses in front of a medieval monument in Turkestan wearing an improbably large headdress fashioned from dozens of red-and-silver skullcaps, their interlocking arrangement echoing the decorative tiles on the wall behind her. An African couple stands in a dark space with corn stalks around them, their faces masked by husks and their hands replaced by cobs.

Those dramatically staged images – commenting on cultural identity in Kazakhstan on the one hand and the Ivory Coast on the other – are just two of the thousands of photographs that can be seen at this year’s Contact festival.

The May festival took a hit when it lost Scotiabank as a title sponsor this year: There will be no catalogue and fewer outdoor works. That’s a loss because those unlooked-for civic encounters with surprising Contact billboards are often the festival’s strongest suit. Still, there are some public art projects, including colourfully costumed and gymnastically posed human figures by Los Angeles photographer Arielle Bobb-Willis on display at the Davisville subway station. But the main action comprises the 36 curated shows invited by festival organizers, plus another 104 community contributions generated by an open call.

If a single theme emerges from this cornucopia, it is one of probing community identity through variations on documentary photography. In this regard, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., is unveiling a treasure-trove: more than 100 photographs of Indigenous life in Northern Ontario in the 1950s and 1960s, taken by John Macfie, a government trapline manager who travelled to Anishinaabe, Cree and Anisininew communities in the Hudson Bay watershed.

The exhibition, People of the Watershed, which continues all summer and fall after Contact wraps, will chart the transition from traditional to contemporary practices as hunters moved off the land in that period. Macfie, who died in 2018, shot adults at work, mending a boat or a fishing net, and children at play, skipping rope or showing off a caribou skull and antlers. He was an amateur photographer and non-Indigenous but the images reflect a sensitive eye and respectful approach to a solid documentary project.

In another time and another place, Yuwen Vera Wang’s images of her ancestral village near the city of Yantai in northeast China also take a documentary approach but with a decidedly elegiac tone. Last year, Wang returned from Canada to the Chinese village where her paternal grandparents spent their lives. As in many areas in rural China, its population is aged because the younger generation has left for the city.

Wang’s images, on show at the Artspace Gallery at 401 Richmond are not an indictment of the lack of health care and social services that the photographer has observed, but rather a poetic look at memory and loneliness in a disappearing China. Many of her photographs include no people, but rather the objects that mark their presence: a magnifying glass, a Mao statuette or clean sheets hanging on a line.

Both of these projects relied on what the photographer might find in front of the camera; conversely, the art of Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibayeva and Nuits Balnéaires from the Ivory Coast is purposefully stagy. Both these artists produce photo shoots with elaborate costumes and props to create images that reveal or critique their cultures.

Menlibayeva, a Kazakh who works in Germany, is showing two series at the Aga Khan Museum. In My Silk Road to You she poses women against monuments and landscapes of Central Asia, dressing them in architectural costumes that include swathes of highly decorative fabrics, playing on an audience’s exotic image of the region. She critiques that colonial conflict between modernity and tradition more emphatically in a second series, Nomadized Suprematism, that poses women, sometimes in military uniforms, against the concrete remains of Soviet-era industrial or nuclear facilities.

Meanwhile, Balnéaires evokes the seven families who founded the coastal city of Grand-Bassam in the 13th century, photographing their descendants in surreal portraits symbolizing the various attributes of each clan with extravagant props and lush landscapes. United in Bassam, at the Meridian Arts Centre in North York, includes, for example, a figure standing under palm trees in a yellow robe wearing a woven helmet that transforms him into a parrot, a reference to the Adahonlin family’s role as teachers while palm nuts symbolize their work as farmers. In other images, figures are surrounded by corn stalks, wrapped in gold robes or use bowls fashioned from the calabash gourd as hats, as Balnéaires commissions local artists in the Ivory Coast to craft a mysterious new iconography.

This startling work is also mounted on billboards at College and Delaware streets while Menlibayeva’s photography is on view both indoors at the Aga Khan Museum and outdoors in the surrounding park.

The work of Vancouver artist Ho Tam falls somewhere between these documentary and artistic impulses: His Manifesto of Hair is a series devoted to the hair salons and barbershops of Manhattan’s Chinatown, which he observed while living in New York in the 1990s and early 2000s. There are more than 100 such businesses in the space of a few blocks, outnumbered only by Chinese restaurants. On show at Paul Petro Contemporary Art, these addictive images use saturated colours and carefully observed street life to speak about identity – maybe joyous, maybe enforced – in a subculture marked by fierce ethnic pride and cutthroat entrepreneurialism.

Contact continues in the GTA through May.

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Joe Ullrich would tell you he isn’t artistic. His photography, however, tells another story.

Ullrich, a regular sports photographer for the News and Tribune in Jeffersonville, will be shooting his 11th Kentucky Derby this year. He only missed one Derby in the past 12 years – 2020 – when COVID protocols prevented him from attending. He has been primarily a sports photographer for the newspaper for 14 years, covering everything from regular season games to state championship celebrations.

Today, he will be joining hundreds of other photographers to capture the 150th Kentucky Derby.

“I’m pretty sure my affinity for sports photography is based on the fact that I am a very technically-minded individual,” Ullrich explained. “Sports photography is based on a mechanical and technical shooting style and that fits my human profile perfectly. Unfortunately, I possess little artistic ability so I rely on my technical proficiency to succeed at my craft.”

And succeed he does. Capturing everything from high school sports to natural landscapes and wildlife, Ullrich has a portfolio that would match up to the most accomplished photographers. But he only shoots photos after his “real job” is done for the day.

By day, Ullrich works as an electrician and certified Generac Generator repair technician. He is the lead electrician for ABTech Electrical Service. He has worked at ABTech for 10 years and currently installs Generac whole-home generators and performs maintenance and repairs as a certified Generac repair technician.

By night, however, Ullrich dons his Nikon camera and lenses, and captures memories for the News and Tribune and all the families it serves in Clark and Floyd counties. The 57-year-old photographer is a Sellersburg resident and limits his professional photography to shooting for the News and Tribune and his own personal satisfaction.

“I really only shoot for the News and Tribune and myself. I have spent some time outdoors photographing nature landscapes and have done some wildlife photography,” Ullrich said.

Ullrich became interested in photography as a boy. He says his interest was instilled by his grandfather, another avid photographer.

“I remember as a youngster looking at his photos and gear and always thought it would be something I would like to learn about,” Ullrich said. “My mom had a Yashica 35mm camera that I was able to get my hands on and start using on some of my Boy Scouts trips around the country. That was the first time I was bitten by the photography bug.”

Ullrich was attending training in the Air Force at Fort Dix in New Jersey when he bought a brand-new Minolta X-700, using that equipment for several years during his stint in the military.

Today, Ullrich sports all Nikon equipment – moving from basic film cameras early on to highly advanced digital equipment today.

“When I was stationed in Greece, I purchased two Nikon lenses to use with a Nikon camera body that I was going to purchase at a later date,” Ullrich remembered. “I ordered the camera body a month later and for some reason, the purchase didn’t go through. So, I had these two Nikon lenses for 10 years and did not have a body for them.”

Ullrich ultimately bought that camera body and has been a Nikon user ever since.

“The main reason I went with Nikon is that all the photographers that I had been around in the past were mostly using Nikons and, at that time, they were at the top of the camera market.”

Since his first Derby in 2013, Ullrich has seen and captured with his camera hundreds of races. All the preliminary races each year are his practice ground for the two minutes he gets to photograph the “the most exciting two minutes in sports.”

“I go to Churchill Downs and get my equipment set up and I go and practice for two or three days keeping in mind the Kentucky Derby is the moment I need to capture,” Ullrich said.

When asked about his favorite moment thus far at the Kentucky Derby, Ullrich is quick to credit all of the great moments documenting the historic event. He does have a favorite, however.

“I would say one of the best moments I have would be when American Pharoah won the triple crown. Having spent some limited time in and around horse racing, that moment was pretty special,” he said.

American Pharoah won the American Triple Crown and the Breeders’ Cup Classic in 2015. He was the 12th Triple Crown winner in history, and in winning all four races, became the first horse to win the modern Grand Slam of Thoroughbred racing.

Of the thousands of images Ullrich has captured through the years, he doesn’t really have a favorite. He does love shooting natural landscapes and nature photos because, “coming home with some really cool photos and an adventure you can attach to them is about as good as it gets.”

Outside of his day job and photography, Ullrich can be found backpacking, hiking, camping and working in his garden. He also enjoys fishing and hunting.

This week, however, he will be hunting for that perfect Kentucky Derby photograph to compliment his already extensive collection of work.

Starting today, May 4, is a ‘Basics in Photography’ camp for youths that the Mylapore MLA, Dha Velu has curated, as he does annually.

Anybody who wants to learn the skills of shooting pictures and has a camera of any kind can join this free camp, that starts at Lady Sivaswami Ayyar Girls School, Mylapore.

Leading photographers of newspapers are resource people at this all-weekends only camp that runs through May. While lectures take place at this school, practicals will be in the outdoors like Nageswara Rao Park.

Call 7994 88 7994.