31 January 2007

Hometown

If you're travellin from Stockholm to Oslo you should look to your right while passing Karlskoga.







approaching

A picture taken in Edinburgh moons ago with Ilford HP5 film.
photographer: Darren Hepburn

I wannabe on the way to Riograd...


Whispers






















Photo: Cathrine Bärgman

Check out her previous guest appareance here on the F-blog

I wannabe Jeanne whoWannabe Umma whoWannabe J Sebring

But there´s a reason why Jeanne is Jeanne and Umma is Umma
and Joakim is Joakim and me being me
We are all best at being ourselfs

I Wannabe Umma whoWannabe J Sebring

about someplace hot . . .

Wannabe J.Sebring


A photo from last summer


Where the dust covers everything and it´s hard to breathe


when love comes to town....

i was a sailor, i was lost at sea. i was under the waves
before love rescued me. i was a fighter, i could turn on a thread.
now i stand accused of the things i've said.
love comes to town i'm gonna jump that train!
when love comes to town i'm gonna catch that flame!
maybe i was wrong to ever let you down but i did what i did
before love came to town...
U2 - when love comes to town

To mr M - welcome to Gothrograd!

and how about a meeting at the headquater?

photo:
F(r)

30 January 2007

Mr M ( from the series "fabulous photographers")

photo: abeku

there is a time...







It seems there is a time and a place for just about everything in this world.
This is the time for not riding a bike...


Gruppo F inbox: Markus Jenemark

"January" © Markus Jenemark

When your camera brakes down and you don't have any new pictures the only way to survive is to create new ones from the old ones. Sorry about the old chestnut ' Girl In Armchair Theme '








closeup




invited guest: Mick Ryan
















"This series of photos of my daughter entitled Tomfoolery started all quite by accident. It was last summer and it was oppressively humid and hot outside so we were forced to spend several weeks almost completely indoors. I didn’t have a lot of work so we started playing around with some of the stuff I had accumulated from junk shops and tacky tourist stalls around Shanghai. There’s about 40 in total in the series and it seems like every time I take a shot it is the inspiration for three more so I have along way to go yet.

Some of the photos are pre planned while others are just a reaction to the objects and playing around with them until I see something that creates a reaction in me. Whether it’s something that makes me laugh or cringe, I’m searching for something more than just a pretty picture. I’m looking to tell a story, though not a narrative, more like clues that can be read into in a variety of ways that is completely up to the viewer. I want to involve the viewer in the photos rather than dictate to them.

Although I’m not influenced by the surrealist movement at all the mood in my photos is definitely dream like. My photos are like childhood memories, while they are like somebody’s childhood it certainly wasn’t mine. It’s a dream childhood, or perhaps a nightmare childhood in some cases, but I want to try to evoke the mood of a memory: something half remembered, half understood, dark, mysterious but hopefully – occasionally – precious. "

-Mick Ryan

invited by Lina Nääs

Sanna Sjöswärd nominated for The Swedish Picture of the Year Award


If you are tuned in to The F Blog you will remember Sanna Sjöswärd as one
of our invited guests in November 2006. We wish you good luck Sanna -
your work is wonderful!


Read more about The Swedish Picture of the Year Award.

29 January 2007

Misha Pedan - coming exhibition



Read all about the coming exibition. Opens on 1 February 2007.












photographer ©Misha Pedan

invited guest: Mia Olofsson


I came across Mia´s pictures just recently. And it was like coming back to
what is is all about - the joy of seeing, the magic of
making pictures.
- invited by ulf fågelhammar


"I am convinced that we are able to change the world. We just have to keep
on trying and fighting for what we believe in. I like to
capture photos that feel
more powerful than what the truth is."
- Mia Olofsson

Check out Mia´s sparkling page at http://himmel.pannkaka.nu






I promise you that I will ask Mia to come back here soon
and share some of her energy! -urbano

invited guest: Piotr Walski

I know Piotr for few years already. First, I’ve seen his pictures on Polish photoportal – impressive portraits. We live close to each other, so we started to meet with Piotr, Marta and their cat Leon. Piotr was always full of doubts about his photography, always to shy his works in other places then this Polish photo site. After few years of his friends hard work on convincing him to share it wider, Piotr decided finally to present his works in real life. His exhibition was a great success. I hope it will give him courage to share more often with us his works.
Piotr is picturing his life, his family, workers of his firm, people he meets during his trips. No sophisticated philosophy, just documenting his every day life.

Photography allows me to get a right distance to surrounding me world. Thanks to photography I am able to domesticate my everyday life.

I adore photography. In both forms – passive, when I watch pictures touching to bones, and active – registering world by myself. I believe there is no need of talking more of my pictures – they should talk on their own.






Piotr Walski (1971) was born and lives till today in Sosnowiec. He studied in AGH University of Science and Technology. He works as civil engineer in his own firm. Besides photography he loves traveling.

More works of Piotr you can find on his website.
invited by Marcin Górski

Salvation, etcetera . . .


© Jeanne Wells

28 January 2007

Post Hip-hop generation -- Dubstep


Today, well - right now - The Swedish radio program P3 Soul is about Dubstep, the new London-based music style of the post-hip hop generation.

Excellent program, meditative loops and a heavy sound! Go to the page and listen for a while, the whole program is there. You will understand more if you know Swedish, but the music is great!

-Christian

silence


Photographer: Mikael Jansson

This image gnaws at me like time torments a sinner. It is the itch one
can't reach, a book with the last chapter torn out.


A veritable enigma.

I study and I see another casket on a pedestal to the right of the tracks
as well, yet it seems open...though I know not what is within. There is
a candle and vague objects atop the closed one.

Is this a vigil? A protest? A memorial?
And what purpose do these
funerary boxes flank the dolly tracks…tracks that end at a movable wall,
a docking bay, a shipping/receiving door?


I look for an answer to my questions within the letters upon the shade
above the plant…they are backwards, I think.


Tysta rum av tid

But I do not know the language. And the surrounding elements offer no
help. If only I could tap the lone figure on the shoulder, ask a few discreet
questions, share the Moment. Maybe there is a flier in the handbag. An
explanation on the lips. An understanding passed between eyes.


I am lost.
Hands & face against the glass.
An outsider looking in.

Silence, yes.
But a Roaring Silence, I think.

Matthew T. Joyce ( Silence)

Picture first published at the F blog: 11 November 2006

Suburban blues

photo: abeku

F-ers real faces

thanx Lina F-ers became recently less mysterious...

Invited guest: Oliver Heissner

CITY NORD

In the late 1950s the town planners of Hamburg (Germany) were looking for alternative locations for the new headquarter-buildings of the expanding oil- and insurance companies.

The northern part of the "Stadtpark", a huge common green park, was chosen to build this new business district as a "Bürostadt im Grünen".

In the respect of its monofunctionality, the spread-out solitary office-blocks and the consequent separation of streets for cars and pedestrian areas it got a nearly perfect example for the leading discussion theme on townplanning in these times: the so called "Charter of Athens" proclaimed by Le Corbusier 1933.

International architects took part in the contest for the planning and in 1964 the realisation of the first buildings started. It took over ten years until the whole "City Nord", the programmatic title of this new modernist "Gesamtkunstwerk", was finished.

Little more than 30 years old, the "City Nord" is already plagued by self-doubts and existential questions resulting from fast changing role models of urban development and the departure of many firms. Already some of the buildings stand empty or have even broken down. So it started a new discussion about demolition or extended and modified use.

At this point Oliver Heissner began a series of pictures in this area, following the visual themes of architectural style and design of the sixties and seventies but also having in mind the unknown future of this monumental "ideal city".










All pictures from 1999.
Color Prints, Diasec-Face-Sandwich, 110x144 cm, edition 3 (+ 1 ).

Shown in the exhibitions:
-- "City Nord: Denkmal, Lebensraum, Zukunft?", Galerie Cato Jans, Hamburg, 2000
-- at "senko" gallery (www.senko.dk), Viborg, Denmark, 2002 (solo-exhibition)
-- and "Stadt Natur" at Museum der Arbeit, Hamburg, 2005

Published in the "Jahrbuch 1999-Architektur in Hamburg", Junius-Verlag and the catalogue "Stadt Natur" Museum der Arbeit, Hamburg.


LVA

"LVA" short form of "Landesversicherungsanstalt" is the German public law insurance corporation. One of their buildings used to be located in the "City Nord" of Hamburg, described above. Some days before the building was knocked down, I had the opportunity of taking some pictures in the rooms. The employees left all the furniture and the plants behind. The whole scenery was quite astonishing. It seemed to be a perfect installation of an artist. Where could you find this typical furniture of the seventies and all these plants?

The empty shelves and tables tell their own story of bureaucracy and monotony.












All pictures from 2002.
Color Prints, wooden frame, 80 x 100 cm, edition 5 (+1).

Shown in exhibitions:
-- "remember this place", Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, 2004
-- "index 05", Kunsthaus, Hamburg, 2005


My interest in both series is equivalent in form and in content. The aesthetical beauty of the buildings and the interiors come together with a subtle sadness and the reflexion about the way of giving up buildings and leaving them empty, because nobody can use them anymore.


Words and images
© Oliver Heissner.
Invited to the F blog by Joakim Sebring.