Guillermo Vidal (b. 1989) is a Portuguese photographer whose perspective was shaped by the transition between Caracas, where he was born, and Murtosa, a coastal town where he grew up. This experience of displacement fuels his interest in social invisibility and in the ways human beings inhabit fragile or transitional contexts.
His work focuses on long-term projects, combining the rigour of documentary practice with a restrained, poetic, and reflective visual language. Through close attention to gestures, rituals, and silences, Vidal examines how political and economic structures shape everyday life, exploring resilience and faith as ways of relating to the world. His practice privileges time, listening, and an ethical commitment to the people he photographs.
His trajectory includes publications in PÚBLICO newspaper and an exhibition at Narrativa atelier in Lisbon, as part of the Narrativa Masterclass.
Currently based in Lisbon, he develops projects in the city where he lives as well as in SouthAsia, particularly in Nepal.
Simon Grunert (b. 1990) is a German photographer and graphic designer. He holds a Bachelor's degree in North American Studies and a Masters in Photography from the University of Applied Sciences Bielefeld and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Gent. With a focus on photobooks, Grunert utilises a documentary approach to build imaginary realms and topographies. His work has been exhibited in various institutions in Germany and France, and has featured in publications such as Camera Austria International.
Wbsite: simongrunert.com
What does reality look like when it is photographed from its own perimeter, in the uncanny zone between certainty, objectivity and dreams, where an idealised version of the world has infiltrated? Sébastien Cuvelier’s photography may well provide the answer.
In his images, what is real always seems larger than it actually is. The photographs appear to have passed through a fantasy filter, to be projected from a dimension where other rules apply. The sensation is similar to the one felt in the twilight zone between wakefulness and sleep, when ambiguous landscapes are crossed in what is not quite a dream.
It is not unusual to feel a little uncomfortable when looking at his photographs. To have the sense that one is intruding on someone else’s secret, imaginary territory. Perhaps it’s because the people, places and objects are made unfamiliar by certain details, yet seem a part of daily life. A superficial mundanity, one filled with residential blocks, interiors decorated with ostentatious luxury, ordinary streets and gardens. And yet, our usual references are rendered obsolete.
The colours, the blurring, the inconsistencies: everything conspires to make us doubt that these photographs portray what really exists. Sébastien Cuvelier appears to have found the way to an observation room that provides a mysterious and disturbing view of the human desire to become a utopian incarnation of itself.
- Text by Philippe Marczewski (.TIFF)
Kölcsey Sára is a commercial and documentary photographer from Hungary, Pécs. She started her career at the age of 32, after she gave birth to her fourth child. She thrives on the opportunity to capture a story by framing complex scenes. She works on several long-term projects with subjects closely related to her own life events and experiences. As an artist and mother she captures the life of women, girls, and mothers. She strongly believes that they all deserve to be seen, and also to be heard.
The nature of the female body is also in her scope of interest: both what it stirs within and on the surface; its ability to create and grow life, its cyclical reminder that death is ever-present and, by the potency of 1st prize at the 42nd Hungarian Press Photo Competition: "Every day life" series category
Giulia Gatti was born in Fabriano in 1995. A lifelong dancer, she moved to Rome, where she collaborated with several dance companies. In 2017 she began her research in photography, studying for a year at the New Institute of Design (NID) in Perugia, where she graduated. In 2019 she won the first prize Portfolio sul Po of the FIAF national circuit Portfolio Italia 2019. She currently continues her journey through South America — between Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Patagonia, and Mexico — dedicating herself to projects that combine dance, photography, and writing. In 2020 her project “Su mia madre tira vento” received the Marco Pesaresi Award for Contemporary Photography.
Tamara Janes is an artist based in Bern. After studying photography at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and at the School of Visual Arts in New York (SVA), she completed a master's degree at the Institute of Art Gender Nature (IAGN) at the Basel University of Art and Design. She then returned to New York on a Studio Scholarship from the City of Bern to continue her research at the Public Library. Among others, her works have been shown at Kunsthaus Glarus, HeK Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel, Kunsthaus Pasquart, Kunsthaus Baselland, Kunsthaus Langenthal, Stadtgalerie Bern, on the occasion of Plat(t)form15 at Fotomuseum Winterthur and at the Bieler Fototage. Her projects have been supported and awarded several times. Tamara Janes received the Swiss Design Award 2023 in the category photography with her work “Copyright Swap”. Since 2019, she has been a lecturer at the photography class, F+F School of Art and Design, Zurich.
Artist Statement
In my work I deal with the conditions of digital images. I take a critical view of current photographic behaviour because our perception and our handling of images is increasingly determined by technology and algorithms. Mostly we unreflectively consume images every second and strive for more and more unrealistic sharpness and brilliance. This development is at the same time thought content and friction surface for my work. By shifting through and contextualizing my own and other people's visual material, I want to create new perspectives and visual commentaries.
M.D.C. always starts a conversation about Reference Guide with the last photo in the book, and this time is no exception. He took the photograph in question in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands.
He enjoys telling the story of the Würzburger Lügensteine, a collection of 18th-century fake fossils — known in English as Beringer’s Lying Stones — of which some can be found at the abovementioned museum. In 2017, H.V., who was in charge of managing the science collection, gave M.D.C. and L.K. a guided tour of the museum and told them of all kinds of curiosities to be found there, including the famous Lügensteine. In the early 18th century, two palaeontologists were keen to play a trick on an arrogant colleague, a certain Johann Beringer. They buried a large part of around 2,000 fake fossils — featuring suns, stars, snails, shells and even Hebrew inscriptions — and sent a beautiful young woman, who pretended to be a doctorate student, to visit Beringer with the rest of the stones. He fell into the trap and went in search of the fossils. He found them, believed the hand of God to be the only explanation for these — what were referred to back then as — ”figure stones”, and wrote a scientific article about them.
Things ended badly for everyone. Beringer realised too late that he had been tricked. He took his colleagues to court and won the case; however, his own name will always be associated with the Lügensteine. M.D.C. grins as he tells the story but is no longer sure whether the young lady’s role in it is true.
We read about the entries in Reference Guide at the back of the publication: “The collection demonstrates a surprisingly high interest in characters and phenomena along the sidelines of these episodes and displays a severe tendency to digress”. A few days later, L.K. calls H.V. just to check the story of the Würzburger Lügensteine. It was most likely two small boys who first brought the stones to Johann Beringer.
- Text by Lars Kwakkenbos (.TIFF)
Brahim Tall (b. 1993) is a Brussels-based artist. Of Belgian, Dutch and Senegalese heritage, his practice studies the politics and expression of identity, as well as paying homage to nightlife and underground culture. With a BA from LUCA School Of Arts, Tall’s works combine photography with video, installation and elements of performance. Where his BA graduation project, Untitled, questioned his sense of identity as an artist, his later Tukuleur project – reflecting on the experience of coming from an ethnically-mixed household – took the form of a video.
Damien Caccia (b. 1989) studied at the École supérieure d’arts des Rocailles, and then at the École Supérieure des beaux-arts de Nantes. His creative approach is based on narration: viewers are drawn into a fictional visual world, playing their own role in its creation. Using various materials – acrylic paint on glass, concrete, plaster, bleached tarps and fabrics – Caccia works at the frontiers of abstraction, with light, shape and colour offering rhythm to his creations. A co-founder of Grande Surface, an artist-run space in Brussels, his work has been exhibited by a range of institutions in France and Belgium.
damiencaccia.com
@damien.caccia
I like to approach different styles of photography, but I prefer the most URBEX (Urban Exploration) photography. I think this genre represents me the best, that's why I'm even more concerned with my project called PLACES SUFFERING.
I'm fascinated by the idea of going into abandoned buildings, finding out their stories, what happened there, why they were abandoned. When I enter such places it is as if I go back in time, I try to imagine those times, to feel the lives of the people who have passed there. Every time I go to a new location, I encompass the emotions for what I can find or what I can meet. We have found all sorts of things undamaged for years, left to chance, from documents, photographs, paintings, dishes, money, clothes, toys, to dead, mummified animals.
Florian Amoser (1990), lives and works in Olten. Florian graduated in 2017 with honors from ECAL in photography. He also holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from ETH Zurich (2011). After working for the last five years in the BA and MA Photography at ECAL as well as conducting the research project Automated Photography (with Milo Keller, Claus Gunti), he is now focussing on his personal artistic practice. Florian is also part of the curation team of annual young art show JKON / Junge Kunst Olten. Florian Amoser’s works explore the different aspects of human perception. Since photography’s invention, human beings use it as an instrument to expand the limits of their observational capacity. Consequently, the technological development of the photographic apparatus has a significant influence on our perception. Florian Amoser builds his own original tools for his artistic works, which make new photographic images possible. His photographs bear witness to a material dissolution of the environment in which the view of physical reality is strongly influenced by experiences in digital space.
Anna Gajewszky (1997, Budapest) is a photographer based in Budapest. She has recently graduated from the photography masterclass of Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design.Her work is mainly characterized by its intimate exploration of personal issues, with a focus on the intricate quality of human relationships. She examines connections people form with each other, their families, their past, their own bodies, animals, and within a larger aspect the land.The use of self portraits underline that her work is rooted in her personal life, however the images transcend personal narrative to engage with broader themes such as womanhood, family connections, generations, and countryside, rural customs, rituals. Her images are mostly staged but they often stay on the ground of reality creating a duality of fiction and truth that is central to her projects. This approach allows her to explore and communicate complex aspects of human experience.Her work was exhibited both in Budapest and internationally, she was published in the 2021 edition of Blurring the Lines, she received the National Higher Education Excellence scholarship, her book was shown at Polycopies 2023, she was finalist at the Paris Photo Carte Blanche Students, she was an exhibitor at the 2024 Breda Photo Festival and was presented at UNSEEN Amsterdam, by Tobe Gallery in 2024 fall.
"My interest lies in the role of narrative as a reference point in representing contemporary social issues. I work between editorial assignments and long-term projects, taking pride in immersing myself within the place and people that I photograph, working with communities over an extended period of time."
Past works have documented the socio-political effects of the Ukrainian revolution; explored notions of escapism along The English Riviera; living in hiding with Albanian families persecuted in the age old traditions of blood feuds, as well as celebratory traditions in Greece. Previously exhibited works have been included in The Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, PhotoIreland Festival, Paris Photo, Magenta Flash Forward and The Renaissance Photography Prize and clients include The FT Weekend Magazine, The New York Times, TIME and National Geographic.
His installations, exhibited among others at Maxxi (Rome), at the BlueProject Foundation (Barcelona) and at the Casino de Luxembourg, investigate the dynamics of memory and how History interferes with private fates.
His book The First Day of Good Weather was shortlisted for “The First Book Award 2015” and published by Skinnerboox the same year.
In 2015 he won the Leica Prize at the Biennial Images of Vevey together with Anush Hamzehian.
His work has been recognized by several public and private institutions, such as the Salomon R. Guggenheim (USA) or the Sasakawa Foundation (Japan-Scandinavia). He has exhibited in numerous countries like: Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Germany, UK, Slovakia, Norway, Russia or Singapore.
His practice is focused on new approaches to the idea of contemporaryy landscape, he has develop different bodies of work such us Metropolis (2018-2019), De Magnete (2016-2018), Environments (2014-2016), Velocidad de las Ventanas (2015) or Almost Black (2011-2015).
Gorospe combines his work as an artist with the study and understanding of the image from a theoretical point of view.
He collaborates in different projects as a curator and photo-editor.
Ieva Maslinskaitė (Vilnius, LT, 1999) is an interdisciplinary artist working with photography based in Amsterdam, NL. Her research interest lies in destabilising binary thinking towards the environment through co-creating with other species, as well as organic and artificial processes, resulting in temporary and mutating image-based works, objects, sculptures or installations. Coming from a photography background, her practice is centred around dismantling the medium from an anthropocentric perspective and putting it back together through an ecocentric one, counteracting contemporary image culture’s aims of being fixed, reproducible, and permanent. She has participated in a number of international group shows including the Riga PhotographyBiennial NEXT – 2023. Maslinskaitė holds a Bachelor of Photography from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.
Laura San Segundo (b. 1990) studied Fine Arts at Madrid’s Complutense University, followed by an MA at Efti International School of Photography and Cinema. Her personal projects have since run alongside commissioned work and a series of teaching roles. A recipient of various scholarships and residencies, Segundo’s projects have been exhibited internationally. With a playful but thoughtful methodology, her work makes conceptual connections between different image types, exploring their many layers of meaning – and how their meaning can be altered by visual strategies like cropping, fragmenting and decontextualising.