The artist Christo died at his home in New York City on Sunday. He's known for major outdoor art installations that often involved wrapping buildings and elements of nature in fabric.
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Before he became an astrophysicist, Ray Jayawardhana was just a kid, looking up at the night sky with his father. "I remember being awed," he says. He's written a book called Child of the Universe.
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In Meryl Wilsner's debut novel, a Hollywood showrunner and her assistant are thrust into the spotlight after an innocuous red-carpet moment prompts gossip about a relationship between the two women.
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The historian and author of Utopia for Realists says that research shows that "especially in times of crisis, we show our best selves. And we get this explosion of altruism and cooperation."
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Gadsby says being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder helped her "be kinder" to herself. Maureen Corrigan reviews St. Christopher on Pluto. Barton Gellman discusses reporting of the Snowden story.
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Our kids' books columnist reports that amidst the messes and fights that result from kids in lockdown, Matthew Cordell's gentle new picture book biography of Mister Rogers has the power to soothe.
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Imagine surrounding yourself with images and sounds, in order to set old ideas in a new context. OK Go's Damian Kulash Jr. describes the process that has inspired the band's hits and viral videos.
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Windows 10’s constantly evolving nature means fresh features arrive twice per year, most recently via the big May 2020 Update. With all the new goodies come a legion of new tweaks and tricks—some of which unlock powerful functionality hidden to everyday users. Others simply let you mold the Windows 10 experience into the shape you see fit. Here are some of the most useful tweaks, tricks, and tips we’ve found over Windows 10’s many iterations.
Our video gaming columnist says she was a reluctant student as a child — but video games, even non-educational ones like the Assassin's Creed series, helped her get interested in learning.
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Forget remasters. Gone are the days where developers could stretch new textures over old games and call it a day. These days it’s all about remakes, raiding the late ‘90s and early ‘00s for games that need more than just a new coat of paint.
Resident Evil 2 set the bar pretty damn high, allowing old fans to relive a beloved game the way they remembered it, while also creating a thoroughly modern horror game for newcomers. It’s not on PC (yet), but by all accounts Square’s Final Fantasy VII Remake does the same. Activision created slightly more faithful remakes with Spyro and Crash Bandicoot, and is doing the same with the upcoming Tony Hawk 1+2. The Black Mesa Project injected new life into Half-Life. 2K’s releasing a Mafia remake this summer.
Whether you suffer from allergies or asthma or just want to optimize your indoor environment, these devices will give you insight into the air you're breathing.
Mortality and well-being; strength and fragility; the clinical and the sentimental: “These are what I mentally distilled the hospital and its environment down to, and what I subsequently used as a working guide for myself,” says Lewis Khan, who spent four years documenting inside London’s hospitals. “A hospital is a juxtaposed place,” he continues, explaining how each extreme, like mortality, is balanced with an opposite extreme, like well-being. “The idea of themes in dichotomy really made sense to me.”
The project began in 2015, a year after Khan won a bursary to produce portraits of local residents, to be exhibited at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. Off the back of a successful exhibition, the hospital trust invited Khan to create a new project about the institution itself. Initially, he intended for the work to be a call against the privatisation of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), but as the project progressed, what emerged was a “universal study of human strength and fragility”. From portraits of doctors and nurses to patients on operating tables and quieter moments captured behind gently drawn hospital curtains, Khan’s resulting body of work epitomises the resilience and optimism with which the NHS operates every day.
“The NHS remains the backbone of the country, made strong by the diverse population who work for it as a vocation as much as a job”
“This is a photograph of Gina, a senior sister, taken in the operating theatres at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. I love the reference to religious symbolism in this image, and I feel this is reflective of the work she carries out.”
Now, five years later, Khan’s images are published in an already acclaimed photobook, Theatre. Following a timely release during the coronavirus pandemic, the first edition of 100 hand-made books sold out in just one week. Now, its second edition is available to pre-order, with all profits to be donated to NHS charities. Khan’s images are accompanied by an essay by his former tutor, photographer and art critic Jim Campbell. In it, Campbell unpicks the project’s wider themes, while situating the work within the discourse of photography and health. “It’s a really important voice to have in the book, both critically and personally,” says Khan.
The dichotomy of themes that guided the photographer’s approach — mortality and well-being; strength and fragility; the clinical and the sentimental — apply to the project on many levels. Firstly to the patients, who are captured undergoing invasive procedures, and the NHS staff, who work tirelessly to support them. They can also be applied to the hospital itself, in the pieces of art that exist as an antidote to its cold white walls and plastic tubes, for example. More broadly, the themes become representative of the NHS itself. “I felt strong parallels between what I understood of the hospital, and what I understood of the political decisions being made around the system that governs it,” Khan explains. The past decade of austerity and budget cuts have forced an increasing pressure on an already fragile system, but “it remains the backbone of the country,” says Khan, “made strong by the diverse population who work for it as a vocation as much as a job”.
“Although calm and clinical, there is a lot of underlying drama to what is happening, which feels very theatrical”
“There was a real meeting of the clinical and the sentimental in hospitals. This image of a found message on a visitors room whiteboard exemplified that for me. There’s such an emotional charge to the often-depicted sterile environments. I also like the ambiguity in who the message is to, it could be for a patient or it could be for the staff”
Khan has always felt in awe of the NHS and its staff — a view that was validated in the process of making this work, which he reflects on as an existential experience. “It’s an environment in which the protections of day-to-day life are peeled back and you encounter elements like vulnerability and care very viscerally,” he says. “I felt very present within myself when making this work.”
The prolonged period that he spent up close with medical professionals also exposed the psychological aspect of their roles. “There’s a hugely performative aspect to the work, like a psychological uniform that is being worn every time they enter the building,” says Khan, explaining how this inspired the title of his book, Theatre. “An operation theatre is the ultimate stage — the patient is on the table, under the lights, and the team around them work to give the best performance consistently, every time. Although calm and clinical, there is a lot of underlying drama to what is happening, which feels very theatrical.”
Now, the people that Khan depicts are performing centre stage in the nation’s fight against Covid-19, often without the necessary personal protective equipment — one of the key issues making headlines during the pandemic in the UK. “It doesn’t surprise me that they have persisted to work without it, putting others ahead of themselves in the process,” says Khan. “There’s an amazing amount of camaraderie within the NHS, and I think we have really seen that through its response to all aspects of the virus’ effects.”
The Razer Blade Studio Edition is Razer’s workstation laptop for those who need pro graphics without a “pro” CPU.
Announced Thursday and based on the same chassis as the Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition that hit the streets early in April, the Studio Edition features Nvidia's Quadro RTX 5000 with 3,072 CUDA cores, 48 RT cores, and 384 Tensor cores, with a 256-bit memory bus. If that sounds an awful lot like the specs of a GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q GPU, that’s because it’s basically the same TU104 die inside the Quadro RTX. One key difference is the amount of memory: 16GB of GDDR6, vs. 8GB in the GeForce version.
Microsoft said Thursday that its upcoming Xbox Series X console will automatically apply some visual improvements to Xbox 360 and even original Xbox games. Others, such as frame-rate doubling, will require developer assistance.
If Trend Micro's generically named “Password Manager” product sounds rudimentary, you're onto something. “Keep it basic” seems to have been the guiding principle behind everything from its bland interface to its limited feature set. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but one would expect a product this simple to work flawlessly. Unfortunately, I encountered some functionality hiccups throughout my test drive that make it hard to recommend against many of the other password managers in our buying guide.
Note: This review is part of our best password managersroundup. Go there for details about competing products and how we tested them.
Trend Micro Password Manager offers baseline features like password capture and autofill, password generation, and a secure protected “vault” to store your credentials in. But it lacks many features that are essential in today’s risky online environment like two-factor authentication and secure password sharing.
If you think that overclocking is solely for performance-obsessed geeks armed with bottles of liquid nitrogen, it’s time to reconsider! Even a small bump in PC performance can delay the need to upgrade your CPU, keeping money in your pocket.
Today I’ll walk you through simple overclocking steps that can boost processor speeds 10 percent or more. If you’re a gamer, video artist, or media streamer, that’s a useful, no-cost upgrade. Read on if you want your PC to go faster!
What is overclocking, anyway?
Overclocking is a technique for tweaking various types of PC hardware, so that it runs faster than the manufacturer’s intended specification. Many processors, RAM modules, and graphics cards can be overclocked, usually by adjusting their settings via your motherboard’s UEFI BIOS. Operate in safe margins and overclocking shouldn’t damage your PC. But, as we’ll discuss, it’s important to manage the additional heat that accelerated hardware can generate.
When the Raspberry Pi 4 launched last June, it delivered an impressive amount of computing power for such a tiny package. But if you still wanted more, Raspberry Pi heard you: Now you can buy a Pi 4 with a whopping 8GB of RAM, the same amount in a Mac mini that costs more than 10 times as much.
Compared to its predecessor, the Raspberry 4 already includes a faster processor, 4K support, and up to 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, a huge jump over the 1GB max memory in the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and more than enough for most higher-end DIY projects. But with 8GB of RAM, the sky’s the limit. As Raspberry Pi noted in its press release, “If you’re a power user, intending to compile and link large pieces of software or run heavy server workloads, or you simply want to be able to have even more browser tabs open at once, this is definitely the Raspberry Pi for you.”
Several smart speakers sound much better and cost much less than Belkin's Google Home-compatible effort. The wireless charging feature, however, is as handy as a pocket on a shirt.
All you need is a sheet of paper and a pen. Read the comic for directions on how to fold and what to write in your zine. Then share it with Life Kit on social media. We'd love to see it!
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This article was originally published in issue #7894 of British Journal of Photography. Visit the BJP Shop to purchase the magazine here.
In her essay, Looking at War, Susan Sontag writes: “Photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric. They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus.” It’s a viewpoint that Vietnamese American photographer An-My Lê would probably agree with. And in her own work – far removed from the photojournalistic tradition of war photography, with its often graphic images of violence and suffering – she addresses many of Sontag’s same ethical concerns, encouraging us to question our perception of conflict and consider our own relationship to it. “I don’t document war and conflict per se. I photograph from the bleachers,” says Lê, “but I hope I address issues related to these subjects in revealing ways — whether I am photographing young American men re-enacting the Vietnam war in the woods of Virginia, or the Marines training in the high desert of California before deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan.
With her contemplative, large-format images, Lê muddies our understanding of conflicts past and present; she does not limit us to one line of understanding by thrusting straightforward depictions upon us. Drawing on historical representations of war, and the traditions of 19th and 20th-century landscape photography, she reflects on how the mythologies and contested histories of battles are played out in the places and memorials of the present. “Lê is not interested in providing objective truths,” explains Dan Leers, curator of the photographer’s retrospective, On Contested Terrain, which was due to run at the Carnegie Museum of Art until 26 July, but has been postponed due to Covid-19. A digital tour of the exhibition can be taken here, and an accompanying publication co-published by Aperture and the Carnegie Museum of Art is now available here. The show delves into her distinct approach, tracing its development across seven bodies of work, which span Lê’s almost 30-year career. “She is embracing uncertainty and ambiguity, and, in turn, allowing viewers to take a moment and step back; to think about their relationship to what is on show.”
The various series may touch on particular conflicts – the American Civil War, Viêtnam, Iraq, and most recently, the deepening social divisions in the present-day US – but common themes and approaches run through them. The use of landscape as a theatrical set on which to interrogate the conflict in question is central. “In Lê’s eyes, conflicts will change, and their players will change, but, in many ways, landscapes stay constant and bear witness to what has taken place,” says Leers.
Lê’s most recent series, Silent General, which previewed at Marian Goodman Gallery in London earlier this year, occupies a central part of the exhibition and epitomises her approach. “It is very much an extension of everything I had been working on previously, she says, “it is a response to what I feel is a war unfolding on the home front.” The ongoing project, currently comprising six fragments, jumps back and forth in time. It evokes darker strands of US history, such as the American Civil War and slavery, to open up questions about the present, both specific events and broader societal shifts, which Lê observed across the US.
Landscapes and sites of conflict remain central in Silent General, with Lê employing the American landscape as a canvas on which to address social and political tensions. In the work of Joel Sternfeld, Stephen Shore, and Robert Adams, Lê observed how the landscape can reflect the state of American culture, and translated this to her own practice, capturing spaces where contemporary issues can be seen and felt. The series evolved from photographs that Lê shot in the American south, which relate to the civil war that took place there. In 2015, film director Gary Ross invited Lê to New Orleans to photograph on the set of Free State of Jones, a Hollywood movie loosely based on the life of Newton Knight, a farmer and Southern Unionist who led an armed revolt against the Confederacy during the American Civil War. She photographed Ross’ recreation of the Battle of Corinth, during which Union general William Rosecrans led his troops to victory over a section of the Confederate army.
While making these pictures, Lê also observed the intensification of debates concerning the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials in the US. “The civil war happened during the 1860s, says Leers, “but with the recent drama surrounding things like confederate statues, or the US and Mexico border, Lê depicts how those historic conflicts continue to shape the landscape and our interpersonal relationships.”
The ascendency of Donald Trump and his open support of white supremacist and ultra Conservative causes played a large part in precipitating the project, which Lê hopes will call into question these viewpoints. Trump formally launched his presidential campaign in June 2015, and the following day, a 21-year-old white supremacist attacked the congregation of one of America’s oldest black churches in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine African-Americans. “Leading up to the election, I felt that there was this rhetoric that became more mainstream: the simplification of issues that we face in the United States really started to bother me,” Lê reflects when I meet her in London, ahead of the opening of the Marian Goodman show. “The divisiveness that was building up was distressing.”
On 12 August 2017, a 20-year-old white-supremacist and neo-Nazi drove his car through a peaceful protest against a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, murdering one person and injuring 28. “That was the second thing that motivated the project, and gave me the confidence to continue,” she says. That same year Trump continued to push for a border wall between the US and Mexico to prevent further migration, a move that critics see as one attack line in a wider culture war being waged with an avalanche of divisive and discriminatory legislation, including an executive order that restricted immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries.“It was interesting to tie everything together, to talk about America’s history and assess the current situation. So I mixed project-based photographs with everyday scenes as the first presidential year unfolded,” she explains.
The photographer has always employed her work to understand conflicts to which she is connected, and that was partly the case with Silent General. “I see conflict outside my doorstep today, so it feels very urgent,” she explains. Her first two bodies of work, Viêt Nam (1994 to 1998) and Small Wars (1999 to 2002), both exhibited as part of On Contested Terrain, respond to her homeland, Vietnam, and the war that forced her to leave it. Lê was born in 1960 in the former South Vietnamese capital of Saigon and grew up amid the Vietnam war. In 1973, following the North Vietnamese invasion of the city, the photographer and her family evacuated to the US. Viêt Nam evolved from her experience of returning home for the first time in the almost 20 years it had been since she left. The desire to break through the fictional and sensationalised depictions of Vietnam in movies and the news motivated her, and similarly to Silent General, Lê wanted to work through her understanding of the conflict, and the relationship she has with it, through her practice and the Vietnamese landscape.
The photographer returned to locations from her childhood memories, which were often markedly different from what she and her relatives remembered. “Returning to Vietnam was a very emotional experience,” she reflects. “This led me to make photographs that reconnected me in tangible ways to memories I had of growing up in Saigon, to ideas about the more bucolic childhood my mum and her family had in the Hanoi area, while simultaneously confronting the reality of a contemporary Vietnam at peace but uncertain about its future in the global capitalist market.” Viêt Nam developed into a reflection on the “fog of war”, as Leers describes it: war’s ability to “scramble” and alter our perception. The project also marked the advent of Lê’s engagement with the subject of conflict, and her commitment to developing alternative ways to address it. In Small Wars, which came next, the photographer engaged with Vietnam again, but from a radically different perspective: participating in the activities of small groups of Vietnam War re-enactors based in Virginia and North Carolina. On a personal level, the experience enabled Lê to further interrogate her relationship with the conflict, particularly her perception of the enemy in this context. By playing various characters during the reenactments, the photographer endeavoured to open up her understanding of the “other”: both US soldiers and the Viet Cong.
With Silent General, Lê embarked on numerous road trips across the country, often seeking out sites of conflict, and photographed what she observed to make sense of what was happening. “It seemed that dramatic events were taking place almost every day, so travelling and finding a way to talk about those became very important,” she says. Walt Whitman’s publication Specimen Days, which Lê came across by chance, provided further inspiration. “It gave me a clarification of how to move forward. He was a journalist, so it is almost photographic in the way he talks about and describes moments and events,” she reflects. Written in 1882, short titled fragments divide the publication, throughout which Whitman reflects on his life, highlighting the influence of historical events on it — an entire section comprises poignant recollections of the American Civil War.
“It gave me a clarification of how to move forward. He was a journalist, so it is almost photographic in the way he talks about and describes moments and events”
The book’s structure also influenced Lê: “The fragments made me think about stringing together a series of pictures to say something; the whole evolution is not linear.” And, as with much of the photographer’s work, it takes time to unravel the Silent General, which feels as though it contains infinite meanings, to reveal the countless historical and contemporary references and the connections between these. “I do not want the pictures existing in a vacuum, and that is why historical references are important,” she explains of an approach, which is reminiscent of the use of history in Whitman’s Specimen Days. One image depicts the weather-worn statues of the secessionist generals Robert E Lee and PGT Beauregard, both generals in the Confederate States Army during the Civil War, housed in a temporary wooden container at a Homeland Security storage. The Confederate monuments represent the dark legacy of slavery and the ongoing issue of racism, which pervade the South, and indeed the rest of the US. By depicting the statues in storage, Lê strips them of their dignity and alludes to the wider movement disparaging this strand of history by protesting against monuments and statues that dignify it The themes of colonialism, migration, and displacement extend throughout the series and across time: another of the project’s fragments comprises images of female border patrol officers positioned either side of a transnational bridge spanning the border between Mexico and the US.
Read together, the images, many of which depict quintessential scenes of American life in exquisite colour — a small, white church nestled among vast expanses of rolling meadow, a tarmacked street lined with industrial warehouses — are the antithesis of news photography. Shifting between landscapes and social portraiture, the photographs do not document specific events. Instead, they contain interweaving narratives that span decades, which interrogate the US and its political history, particularly in the South, along with multiple other issues such as identity, racism and immigration.
The instantaneousness of news photography is absent from all of Lê’s work, which she creates using a large-format camera. The effect is powerful, imbuing her photographs with a sense of stillness and grandeur. The photographer often shoots from an elevated perspective, affording viewers the space to contemplate what is in front of them. “I want to keep the viewer engaged long enough so that they will start being engaged intellectually as well,” she says. This is exemplified in 29 Palms (2003-4), which is also on show as part of On Contested Terrain, and which Lê began following the invasion of Iraq in 2003: “I was distraught at the idea of another Vietnam repeating itself,” she explains. The photographer initially applied to embed as a photographer with deployed troops, but, with all of the positions filled, she visited Twentynine Palms instead — a Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center nearby Joshua Tree National Park in San Bernardino County, California. Her striking black-and-white images capture marines in training for deployment to Iraq against barren swathes of desert. The photographs hold our gaze and exude a sense of the magnitude of war, and the overwhelming experience of being entangled in it.
Lê’s work draws us in with its “complicated beauty,” as she describes it, explaining the discordance between her images’ aesthetic appeal and their darker, underlying narratives. “I want people to enter into a picture and have a complicated physical and experience,” she says, which is also facilitated by the ambiguity of the photographs, both individually and in series. However, the work is as much for Lê as it is for us, allowing her to question and draw connections between things in an attempt to understand them. This creates multi-layered photographs that take time to untangle. As Leers observes: “There are often more questions asked than answered,” and that is what makes Lê’s work so crucial – it considers and meditates upon the impact of conflict, reaching across time and space, to explore “how it continues to shape our cultural narratives”.
Based in Berlin since the beginning of lockdown, Viktoria Sorochinski is one of many photographers who has used this time to reflect upon her practice and her personal life. Before the spread of Covid-19, she was preparing a solo show of a recent documentary project called Poltava Neverland — “exploring one of the most mysterious and unexplored places in Ukraine,” she describes — which was forced to be postponed. Allowing herself instead to “focus on things that I didn’t have time to do for a long time”, Sorochinski has created a new project, titled INsideOUTside. Shot entirely in one room of her apartment, the Ukrainian-born photographer uses her body to interact with the everyday objects that have come to define her experience of the lockdown period, be they rolls of toilet paper or a tree branch she found on her daily walk to the park.
The idea for the project, she says, emerged out of a desire to “revisit the subjects and approach that I was working with while creating my old self-portrait series titled The Space Between (2007-2008),” she explains. “I was tracing my identity through dreams, memories of the Ukrainian village where my grandparents used to live, and reconnection to nature”.
However, though the inspiration was already there, the process of making each photograph was intuitive and spontaneous, often reacting to what she saw or felt on that particular day, with no clear vision of what the final outcome would look like. The result is a series which straddles the reality of today, and a surreal narrative inspired by fairytale and mythology.
“I am also working in a much more minimalistic approach, which is of course in a large part due to the lack of access to nearly anything at the moment,” she says of the project. “And I rather enjoy this challenge, of coming up with images using only a few objects and the play between the light and the shadow.” Sorochinski has been sharing images from the project on her Instagram profile, which has added an element of exchange and connection to the process.
As a lecturer and teacher in her pre-pandemic life, Sorochinski will be hosting an online workshop this Friday 29 May, titled From Portrait to Narrative. Though lockdown regulations are beginning to ease, InsideOutside is still ongoing, and continues to evolve and regenerate. “I guess only time will tell,” she says.
How did you develop the project? Did you find that the formula changed as the days went on?
In the very beginning, I started to combine landscapes or other shots that I took outside while walking in parks and streets of Berlin, with my self-portraits and other symbolic images. But later on, I realised that I want to focus entirely on the internal process and only include images that were taken indoors.
It is unusual for me to share my work in the process, especially because such changes can happen, and I usually like to see first where it takes me and how I feel about this work, prior to making it public. But I felt that this lockdown situation had to be approached differently because now, more than ever, people need to exchange and feel the presence of others.
I also felt that people needed some positive inspiration. Therefore, I decided to share this project as it grows in the process via my Instagram account. And it has been quite motivating and rewarding to get the feedback from people.
“Sometimes, it feels like I have already used every corner and it is difficult to come up with new ideas to make the images different from one another. There are days when nothing works and I get frustrated. But then comes the next day, and the sunshine brings a new wave of inspiration.”
Did you find the repetitive nature of interacting with the same space challenging?
It is quite challenging. I photograph everything in one room and mostly in the second half of the day when the sun is shining through the window, as I am using only available daylight.
Sometimes, it feels like I have already used every corner and it is difficult to come up with new ideas to make the images different from one another. There are days when nothing works and I get frustrated. But then comes the next day, and the sunshine brings a new wave of inspiration.
“During the lockdown, we are all forced to spend a lot of time at home, which in fact makes us turn our gazes inwards, and connect more with the inner-self.”
Your work often addresses themes of relationships, family and the home. Do you see these reflected in this new work?
The relationship with oneself, which is also part of my other projects, is definitely part of this series as well, especially when it comes to facing your own ‘shadows’, fears and the reflections of the subconscious. The “home” is only part of this series in a symbolic way. Home is a representation of the inner self that we often see in our dreams, and is also one of the symbols described in Jungian psychoanalysis.
I often dream of either discovering some strange home in the forest or by the sea, or that I am living in a home that I know is mine but that seems completely foreign, and so on. During the lockdown, we are all forced to spend a lot of time at home, which in fact makes us turn our gazes inwards, and connect more with the inner-self.
Do you view this project as an extension of your wider practice, or as something separate and particular to the current environment?
This project is, in a way, an extension of my old project The Space Between. But generally, all my work is somewhat connected by the general approach. I am always interested in revealing something that lies beneath the surface of the visible, and to find ways to connect to the subconscious.
I am always searching for a visual language that can speak to anyone regardless of their cultural or religious belonging, and I usually do that through universal symbols or clues that anyone can relate to, even if they imagine their own story when they see my images.
I think I have developed this approach because of my immigration background. I have lived in so many different countries, and so often, I had to go through moments of alienation, dislocation, and language barriers, and therefore through my art I am constantly striving to build a kind of bridge between myself and other people.
Could you talk us through the process of how you created on of the images from the series?
Most of the images come to life in a very intuitive and spontaneous manner. For example, in the very beginning of the series, I used a tree in a couple of images, but I didn’t really plan these images in advance at all.
I was just walking on the street, and I saw a quite large branch of a tree broken and lying on the ground, so I picked it up and brought it into the room where I photograph. I simply began interacting with it in front of the camera, waiting for the magic to happen.
I rarely picture a specific image in my head that I would reproduce later, as I like to allow some space for a chance or a moment of inspiration. I really enjoy the process of ‘go with the flow’ creation.
Although, in my very early works as an artist-photographer, I used to sketch specific ideas and try to create them later. This approach is now in the past.
