The art festival 212 Photography Istanbul defiantly breaks away from Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian politics and polarised society. In its sixth year, it is an outward-looking festival keen to project its young, vibrant and international character.

The programme is ambitious, with exhibitions and events that cross from the Asian to the European sides of the city. It takes visitors on a tour of a lesser-known but vibrant and burgeoning Istanbul. Exhibition spaces include a disused gasworks, a 15th-century cannonball factory, a Roman Catholic church and an old brewery. There is a playfulness in the curation: Annelie Vandendael’s photographs of swimmers float on water.

Putting on a festival of photography in Turkey is no mean feat. The organisers had to negotiate a fine balance between knowing the limits of what could be shown and keeping their integrity while trying all that they might to push the boundaries. One public installation by the artist Özgür Ballı using augmented reality was repeatedly moved by the police because it was in a square where protesters gather.

One artist smashing boundaries and subverting stereotypes is Mous Lamrabat. He has created his own utopian world in the portrait series Mousganistan. This is a joyful place where Lamrabat plays with symbols of western capitalism and his Moroccan heritage to create thought-provoking images that are deceptively simple and full of humour. His eye for colour pops off the wall and the compositions always surprise.

He says his favourite way to work is to create images on the spot and be surprised by the outcome. At a family gathering of 30 people, he decided to photograph each relative using just the props around him. His nephew wanted to do something with a plant and Mous wanted to make him a superhero. That spontaneous energy exudes from his images, but they are at the same time effortlessly cool.

Daniëlle van Zadelhoff uses the language of baroque painting to present enigmatic portraits of people whose gaze is often longing or tragic. There is something uncomfortable and uncanny about these subjects who are disconnected with time and place. She says she recognises that people who are suffering are often alone and she wants her photographs to communicate that desire for contact. Her models are all people who have experienced something life-changing, but theirs are not stories that Van Zadelhoff wants to share. Instead, she uses lighting and composition to draw the viewer in and make them reflect on their own experiences.

Another artist digging into human emotion is Éva Szombat, although she is exploring the realm of happiness, in all its guises. She has a photographic eye for the surreal and a taste for kitsch. Her still lives and portraits are often tongue in cheek and they always pop and fizz with colour. In her series Practitioners she finds people who devote themselves to the pursuit of happiness, be it through their pets, hobbies or relationships.

A game of quick-fire association is played out in Surrealogy, made in collaboration with Fanny Papay, depicting the 12 signs of the zodiac. After all, astrology in all its mystery and pretence is a place where people go to look for happiness.

Made in Dublin may feel out of character with the rest of the festival but there is no theme to the programme, so it comes as a welcome opportunity to experience this extraordinary, symphonic portrait of a city. The piece has been lauded by Martin Parr as the best of street photography. Being immersed in a flow of images, projected across nine screens, with sound and words is gripping, hypnotic and at times jarring, just as the experience of walking through an urban environment can be when sounds, thoughts, memories collide with the shifting world around you. It is a masterful piece of collaboration with photography by Eamonn Doyle, design by Niall Sweeney and a soundtrack by David Donohoe that includes the words and voice of Kevin Barry.

The festival includes a large show of artists using AI to create images, but it was the next-door exhibition focusing on botany that made me question what was real. Where the Wild Roses Grow imagines a time before humanity had the power to destroy its environment. Images of oversized flowers and suffocating forests compete with installations of living plants to create a space that is reminiscent of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.

Tine Poppe’s majestic portraits of flowers have something of the memento mori about them. She photographs cut flowers in a studio against printed backdrops of landscapes in crisis. They are strange, unreal looking images that highlight the climate crisis by looking at the environmental cost of growing flowers in industrial-scale greenhouses and transporting them long distances.

Students from the AP Drawing & Painting and AP Photography classes explored The Broad in Downtown Los Angeles last week, taking in the museum’s collection of work by modern and contemporary artists. The goal of the field trip was to explore the special exhibition “Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody,” paying attention to his career and growth as an artist.

Students examined Haring’s chronological evolution to see how he edited, practiced, and experimented with styles, medium, and ideas. This serves as meaningful inspiration for AP students, who, in creating a portfolio their senior year that investigates an idea will have to do the same sort of examination of their own body of work.

David Gomez Novy ’24, while initially caught off guard by Haring’s works, came to an appreciation, saying, “An unconventional canvas can add to a work or sometimes be the meaning in and of itself.”

For Autumn Zhou ’24, Haring’s use of scale was her biggest takeaway. “He wasn’t afraid to go big and take up space,” she said. “It inspired me to paint bigger things.”

“Sometimes the simpler things can be more effective,” said Carlo Campos Costanzo ’24 about Haring’s bold style. “It lets them be iconic.”

Flintridge Preparatory School, 4543 Crown Ave., La Cañada Flintridge, (818) 790-1178 or visit www.flintridgeprep.org.

Whether you’re an experienced photographer or are just starting out, you should consider joining Elizabethtown College’s Photography Club! The Photography Club meets bi-weekly on Wednesdays at 6 p.m. in Steinman Center 211 and welcomes anyone to show up to a meeting if they are interested in joining. As a smaller club, the members are very close since they all share a love for photography. As stated, the club accepts members of any skill level and encourages members to help each other develop their skills. 

Meetings start with attendance and announcements before revealing that week’s photo challenge. There is no winning these challenges—they just work to give photo club members a direction to work in as they walk around campus and take pictures. After taking their pictures, members return to Steinman Center to upload the photos to a Google Drive for the group to explain their thought processes, see where their inspiration comes from and have other members comment on them. 

“It’s a cool way for all of us to see each other’s photos and to look at the different perspectives that are captured,” Vice President and junior student Paige Henson said. 

As the Vice President, Henson assists the photo club’s president, junior Grace Ceschan, with tasks including creating presentations for meetings, sending out reminders and coming up with the challenges. Cabinet members also discuss the best way to show examples or explain the prompt for members prior to the meeting. 

When photos are posted on the club’s Instagram, they often tag the photographer and include a quote about the inspiration behind the photo, how it was taken or any challenges the photographer overcame in order to get that perfect shot. Photos included on the page are not only of locations on campus, but places in the surrounding Lancaster County that fit that week’s challenge. If you find yourself on their page, you can find several fall related photos ranging from an autumn leaf to an autumn forest.

“Sometimes we will create a Google form with photos and whoever’s photo gets the most votes, we post it on our Instagram! We are working on coming up with new ways to be interactive and create these winners,” Henson said.

Their Instagram is also used to remind members of meeting times and upcoming events. Unfortunately, due to the interference of weather, the photo club has not had any recent events, but they will begin fundraising soon in order to fund field trips for members. The photo club will also be selling some pictures that are taken by members at the Homecoming table. They have two upcoming field trips to Stoltzfus Pumpkins in Manheim, Pa. and to a local alpaca farm, which will allow the club to participate in challenges off campus. 

“From when I first started the club, I really loved the photo challenges because it is broad enough you can have your own interpretation and seeing everyone else’s photo is really fun as well. That is something that has stuck in this club and everyone seems to enjoy it as well,” Henson said. 

Cabinet members are considering finding ways for members to take photos for events happening around campus along with the Civic Engagement Club. 

If you are interested in joining, the club can be reached at their email, photoclub@etown.edu or their Instagram, photoclubetown. 

Arts & culture: Photography in Northampton and Worthington, theater at UMass Amherst, and more

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  Photos by Paul Griffin of old stone ruins and buildings in Ireland are part of an October exhibit at Forbes Library in Northampton. Image courtesy Forbes Library

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  Atmospheric landscape photos by Ken Kippen are part of an October exhibit at Forbes Library in Northampton. Image courtesy Forbes Library

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  Abstract photos by Virgina Sandman are part of an October exhibit at Forbes Library in Northampton. Image courtesy Forbes Library

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  The Pioneer Valley Symphony opens its 85th season this evening, Oct. 13, in Greenfield with a three-part concert. Image courtesy Pioneer Valley Symphony

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  Smith College pianist and music professor Jiayan Sun will play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Pioneer Valley Symphony Oct. 13 in Greenfield. Photo by Derek Fowles/courtesy Pioneer Valley Symphony

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  The Ukranian band Kommuna Lux, with a Ringo Starr ringer on drums, comes to The Divive Theater at Gateway City Arts in Holyoke Oct. 19. Image courtesy Gateway City Arts

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  The UMass Theater Department opens its 2023-2024 season Oct. 27 with a performance of “The Hatmaker’s Wife.” Image courtesy UMass Theater

Published: 10/12/2023 11:40:17 PM

Atmospheric photos at Forbes Library

NORTHAMPTON — Hosmer Galley at Forbes Library features the work of three photographers this month who work in black and white but take different approaches to their work. Yet all three capture a sense of mystery and wonder in their pictures, whether abstract or more detailed.

Virginia Sandman says dreams are the source of some of her photos, while others can come from “simply touching and interacting with materials like thread and clay and playing around with light.” She also has a background in sculpture, video installations, and performance art that factors into her photographs.

Paul Griffin says a trip to Ireland last year to trace his Irish roots led him to photograph ghostly stone ruins in isolated parts of the country — an ancient farmhouse half covered in vines, the remains of a church next to a Celtic cross in an empty field — with the goal of hopefully evoking “some of the atmosphere, mystery, wonder and the connection I felt to this enchanting land.”

And Ken Kipen contributes striking landscape photos, such as sunlight breaking through a forest canopy like a message from heaven, that he’s created while traveling, allowing him to “connect with worlds very different from my own.”

In the end, Kipen writes in exhibit notes, his travels have provided “subjects I somehow recognize from an awareness beyond seeing. Then the subject itself is transcended, giving way to feelings rooted deep in our collective memory.”

There will be an artists’ reception at the galley tonight (Friday, Oct. 13) from 4 to 5:30 p.m.

Historic photos in the Hilltowns

WORTHINGTON — The town’s Historical Society will open its featured exhibit for 2023, “Harriett Langdon Pruyn Rice: Seeing Worthington Through A Different Lens,” Oct. 29 at 6 p.m. at the Worthington Historical Building, located on 6 Williamsburg Road.

Rice, born in Albany, New York in 1868, married Worthington native William Gorham Rice in 1892. Though the couple and their son lived primarily in Albany, they spent time in summers in Worthington well into the early 20th century, where Harriett Rice kept journals and developed a keen interest in photography.

The exhibit features some 50 of her photographs in Worthington from 1892 to 1906, along with background research and excerpts from Rice’s journals. Her photos of the town’s residents offer a candid and natural look at their lives, in their homes and yards and surrounding fields.

At the exhibit opening, researchers/curators Jim Downey, Kate Ewald and Arthur Tuttle will speak briefly about the the artist and the gift of her glass negatives to the town’s library in 1944, as well as about her journals, now at the Albany Institute of History and Art.

Pioneer Valley Symphony opens new season

GREENFIELD — Now celebrating its 85th year of performances, the Pioneer Valley Symphony (PVS) and Chorus will launch its 2023-2024 season tonight (Friday, Oct. 13) at 7:30 p.m. at Greenfield High School Auditorium.

The concert features “three moving reflections on immigration,” beginning with Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, written as the composer returned home to Russia after several years in Germany.

Smith College Assistant Professor of Music Jiayan Sun, acclaimed for his piano skills by the New York Times and other reviewers, will join PVS to play the concerto.

The PVS Chorus then joins the orchestra for “Life of an alien,” a passage from the Nigerian opera “Ìrìn Àjò (Odyssey of a Dream),” composed in 2018 by Mount Holyoke College music professor Olabode Omojola as a reflection of emigrating from Nigeria to the U.S.

The concert concludes with Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, which the composer wrote in New York City in 1943 as a bitter reflection on his exile from his home in Hungary during WWII.

PVS has also scheduled performances in Amherst, Belchertown and Chicopee for its 2023-2024 season, in addition to other concerts in Greenfield.

Symphony Director Tianhui Ng says each concert includes a major work well known to audiences as well as “lesser-known yet spectacular works like … Roxanna Panufick’s ‘Abraham: Violin Concerto for Hope.’”

Tickets and additional information are available at PVSOC.ORG or by calling (413) 773-3664.

Ukraine calling

HOLYOKE — Everyone’s heard of gangsta rap. But how about “Odessa Gangsta Folk Music”?

Kommuna Lux, a band from Odessa, Ukraine that blends klezmer music and what the group calls “rowdy speakeasy tunes” from its hometown, will play The Divine Theater at Gateway City Arts on Oct. 19 at 8 p.m.

The seven-member group formed in 2014 and did its first performances in “noisy flash mobs” across Odessa, including the city’s famous fish market, Privoz; on tram lines; on the noted Primorsky Boulevard promenade; and on “rusty rocking boats” along the beach.

All of this activity ended up “perplexing residents of the city,” the ensemble notes.

Today band members employ a variety of instruments — accordion, guitar, clarinet, trombone, trumpet, bass and drums — to play music with a Bohemian sensibility that blends klezmer with other Eastern European sounds, Balkan rhythms, and traditional tunes from Odessa, long a center of Jewish life in Ukraine.

The band’s appearance in Holyoke is part of a worldwide tour that’s taken the group across much of Europe and to Israel. Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kommuna Lux has also collected donations at its shows for humanitarian relief in their home country.

Tickets for the Oct. 19 concert are $30 in advance and $35 at rhe door. The Bistro at Gateway City Arts will be serving food and drink from 5 to 9 p.m. that evening.

Curtain rises at UMass Amherst

AMHERST — The University of Massachusetts Theater Department opens its new season Oct. 27 with performances of “The Hatmaker’s Wife,” a play by Lauren Yee that examines the different legacies of family, love and home.

The story begins with a character known simply as “Voice,” a young woman who moves into her boyfriend’s rented house outside of New York City in the expectation of domestic bliss.

Instead, the character finds she’s essentially sharing her new home with the troubled previous inhabitants, an elderly hatmaker, Hetchman, and his long-suffering wife, both of whom are conjured into being by talking walls.

“The Hatmaker’s Wife,” directed by UMass Theater Professor Gina Kaufmann, blends elements of modern rom-coms, including gross-out jokes and a stereotypical goofy neighbor, with close attention to Jewish culture and folklore, like a snack-eating Golem and the Jewish immigrant experience in America.

The play will be staged at the Curtain Theater, in the Bromery Center for the Arts, Oct. 27-28 and Nov. 1-4 at 7:30 p.m.; there’s also a matinee pn Nov. 4 at 2 p.m.

Tickets — $17 for general admission, $5 for students, seniors, and Card to Culture patrons — are available at the UMass Fine Arts Center box office at 1-800-999-UMAS.

— Compiled by Steve Pfarrer

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The annular solar eclipse on Saturday could be a great photo opp – if you do it right.

H​ere are some tips for photographing the eclipse, based on advice from NASA.

First, always protect your eyes.

-T​hat means never looking directly at the sun. Experts recommend always wearing approved solar eclipse glasses.

-​Solar glasses should always be worn directly over your eyes or prescription glasses.

-​The lens of a camera or telescope can intensify the sun’s rays, causing even more eye damage.

Can I take a photo of the eclipse on my phone?

-​You can. But it’s not recommended.

-​Just like your eyes, there’s a chance the phone’s lens could be damaged by the sun.

-​Average cell phone photos of a solar eclipse probably aren’t going to turn out that well anyway.

Specialized equipment and knowing how to use it is key to really great – and safe – eclipse photos.

-That includes a special solar filter over the camera lens to protect it from damage.

-A tripod is key for stability, which helps avoid blurry photos in low light.

-​A delayed shutter release allows you to take photos without shaking the camera.

There will be lots of really cool things to take photos of besides the sun.

-​The landscape around you will change during the eclipse, with interesting shadows and lighting.

-​You might see mini images of the eclipse on the ground in a pinhole effect due to light filtering through leaves on trees.

-​People around you will be animated and generally looking amazed. “The real pictures are going to be of the people around you pointing, gawking, and watching it,” NASA photographer Bill Ingalls notes. “Those are going to be some great moments to capture to show the emotion of the whole thing.”

M​ORE ON WEATHER.COM

-​The Forecast For Saturday’s Annular Solar Eclipse

–Here’s How Much Of The Eclipse You’ll See In Your State And What Time It Will Happen

–​Everything You Need To Know About The Upcoming Eclipse

-​Your Guide To Solar Eclipse Glasses

Weather.com reporter Jan Childs covers breaking news and features related to weather, space, climate change, the environment and everything in between.

The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.

5DayDeal is back with a photography bundle that’s better than ever. This year for the first time ever, Fstoppers is including two tutorials, Photographing the World 1 with Elia Locardi and the Headshot Crash Course with Peter Hurley. The full bundle only costs $166 and is 97% off the total value of the bundle. 

Every year, 5DayDeal organizes a massive bundle deal that incorporates education, software, and tools from a wide variety of leaders in the photography industry. The bundle is by far the best value of any photography deal the entire year. The product list is honestly jaw-dropping this year.

For every sale that occurs, 10 percent is given to some incredible non-profit organizations around the world including Orbis, Mercy Ships, and Make a Wish Foundation. By purchasing this bundle, you’re not only improving your photography skills, you’ll also be improving the lives of thousands of people around the globe. 

This deal only lasts until October 17, 2023 so be sure to act quickly and share the news with anyone else who might benefit from this opportunity. 

From the ever-present squirrels and deer on campus to the more elusive foxes, herons and even bobcats found in the natural areas, Miami University and Oxford have a diversity of species to be spotted. Add to that the beautiful landscape of Bachelor Pond or the calming waters of Four Mile Creek, and the urge to explore is insatiable.

Looking to go on a nice hike in the forest? Need even more reason to go wildlife watching? Look no further: The Miami Student is hosting its first-ever nature photography contest!

Submit a new or old picture of a wild animal from Friday, Oct. 13 until Friday, Oct. 27 for a chance to win! Photos can be submitted online through this form. After submissions close, contestants will be narrowed down by GreenHawks Editor Sam Norton and Photo Editor Jake Ruffer. The finalists will be announced on Monday, Oct. 30, and you can vote for your favorites until Friday, Nov. 3.

The winners will be announced on Friday, Nov. 10. Winners will receive a framed version of their photo. 

Categories

Wildlife: All species of wildlife can be submitted to this category. Happy wildlife watching!

Plant life: The natural areas around Oxford boast an incredible array of plant life. And they don’t run away when you get close!

Landscape: The Oxford area has no shortage of wide open spaces and beautiful backdrops. Take some time and capture the perfect shot of the nature around you!

Rules

Photos must be taken in the Oxford area (Hueston Woods is included). Please do not remove plants from their habitat or stage photos. Remember to never approach, harm or otherwise interact with wildlife when taking photographs. Final photos should not include people.

Please ensure that the file upload is of the highest quality. The Miami Student retains the right to publish the submitted photos in print and online in perpetuity, with attribution to the photographer. Happy photographing!