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| © Pierfrancesco Celada |
fototazo has asked a group of 50 curators, gallery owners, blog writers, photographers, academics and others actively engaged in photography to pick two photographers that deserve (more) recognition - the underknown, the under-respected as well as not-appreciated-enough favorites. A little more information on the project is available in the first post in the series here.
Today we continue the series with responses from Gwen Lafage.
We began the series with responses from Nicholas Nixon, Matt Johnston, Blake Andrews, John Edwin Mason, Aline Smithson, Colin Pantall, Michael Werner, Liza Fetissova, Laurence Salzmann, Bryan Formhals, Richard Mosse, Shane Lavalette, Amy Stein, Amani Willett, Wayne Ford, S. Billie Mandle, Leslie K. Brown, Gordon Stettinius, Marc Feustel, Hin Chua, Adriana Rios Monsalve, Daniel Augschoell, Larissa Leclair, Elinor Carucci, Pieter Wisse, Daniel Echevarría, Natalie Minik, Qiana Mestrich, Jason Landry, Rona Chang, Stella Kramer, Joanne Lukitsh and Yumi Goto.
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| © Flore Aël Surun |
Respondent: Gwen Lafage is the founder of Carte Blanche, a project dedicated to emerging photography from around the world. The project will be first launched this fall online and then in San Francisco as a photography gallery and bookstore.
She also blogs regularly about the photography that questions and inspires her life. Originally from Brittany, France, she now lives in San Francisco.
Selections: Pierfrancesco Celada and Flore Aël Surun. Both are talented young European photographers who have succeeded in creating powerful emotional and question-raising bodies of work.
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| © Pierfrancesco Celada |
Pierfrancesco Celada explores solitude in the modern Megalopolis. His long-term project in Japan shows isolation and loneliness in crowded environments. His images depict the complex emergence of individualization that is probably even stronger in modern cities than in the countryside. In a society where ways of communicating have multiplied through modern technologies, he captures the opposite phenomena, highlighting the lack of real communication and human relationships. By capturing scenes of daily life he questions the paradoxes of our time and brings us back to our relationship to others… moreover each one of his images is well thought out and beautifully executed. I look forward to seeing the next part of his series as he is now back to Japan! Watch this.
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| © Flore Aël Surun |
Flore Aël Surun is a French photographer who belongs to Tendance Floue, a French collective that I particularly enjoy. They're a group of engaged documentary photographers who are not afraid to shout what they think with strong images. Flore Aël Surun tells each of her stories with sensibility, with femininity and elegance and makes each one a beautiful testimony about life, death, love, "survivors." "Because [as she says] their survivals of any orders get her to the heart without a warning." And I believe that each one of her images gets to our heart without a warning. They're aesthetically beautiful and emotionally fascinating. Through her approach Flore Aël Surun teaches us the power of personal documentary photography and its undeniable artistic appeal.