Riitta Päiväläinen II

ICE

Years ago I found a handmade dress from second-hand shop.

It fitted me perfectly. To whom this dress was made for?

What was the story of her life?

For me a piece of clothing represents its former wearer.

Someone was present while ago, but now she/he is gone.

The faded colours and tears in the fabric show the signs of the time passed.

The distinction between absence and presence is subtle. Riitta Päiväläinen

Bobby Becker

Digitally enhanced but a fantastic concept from Nashville based photographer Bobby Becker.

Victoria Sorochinski

Victoria Sorochinski has produced a series of mother and daughter portraits 'Ana and Eve' exploring age and power. I have chosen these two images involving textiles and bonds as I found them poignant, powerful and disturbing. I love the theatrical use of colour and the narrative led itself in my mind to being developed into costume.

“Anna & Eve” is a long-term narrative project that I started to work on in 2005. This project (as well as most of my work) dwells in between fantasy and documentary. Even though, all the scenes are staged, they reveal a real relationship of a mother and her daughter. Anna and Eve were particularly interesting to me, when I first met them in 2005, because the boundary between the child and the adult woman was blurred to an unusually high degree. Anna – the mother seemed at times more of a child than her 4 year-old daughter – Eve. It was often hard to tell who held the power and control between the two, and who was learning the essence of being a human in this world.

I was always interested in folk tales as a representation of common knowledge, and their influence on children’s perception of good and bad, and of morality. Therefore, in the beginning of the series I often applied to my photographs a frame of a myth or a folk tale. These photographs are not based on particular tales; rather, they are new myths that represent through phantasmagoric scenes my interpretation of the real relationship of this mother and daughter. Victoria Sorochinski 

Iwajla Klinek

Berlin based photographer Iwajla Klinek has been documenting children in the villages of Lausitz, The Black Forest and Romania wearing traditional costumes. This project Crowns and Gladioli explores the ritual of costume and how it exists and is re interpreted for out times in specialist fencing and boxing clothes. These clothes and roles are placed on children by adults in rituals and ceremonies denoting their coming of age and the transition into adulthood.

"Klinke never grasps for universality in her images; in fact, she is fascinated by the ways that humans grasp for universal meaning by entrenching their lives in the symbolic. It is a fascination we can’t help but share, communicated as it is through one of the most strikingly original voices to appear on the scene of photography for some time." –Travis Jepssen

Thank you

Ken Hermann

Flower Man by Ken Hermann is a series of photographs of flower merchants at Mallick Ghat flower market. If you had to dress in flowers, this would be the way to do it.

Angélica García

"Everyday I lose you… time, You are like water that slips away from me. Presence. Moment. Movement. How can I do to show how you run from me? How can I show that even if I freeze you, then you aren't the same? How if I steal your essence, I don’t have you anyway? Strange presence… Emptiness."
Angélica García

Beautiful distressed photographs by Angélica García exploring the theme of loss and loneliness. I would love to see her working on a look book.

Swarte

Top to bottom: The Mosuo Family, Equilibrium, Mamihlapinatapai

Body paint is costume to me, so allow me to deviate from textiles and share the amazing collaborative work of two Romanian artists Corina Olaru and Manuela Vulpescu known as Swarte. This project explores the survival of indigenous people in the 21st century through their symbolism creating art through body painting painting and photography.

"It was painting, it was drawing, it was body art and in the end it became photography; so many levels and so many ways, as a kind of representation of all historical human lessons that made us what we are today and what we can become in the future. All characters in the art works were “drained” of their own individuality for a better comprehension and fluidity of the narration." Swarte