Photography (Photography)

Michal Chelbin’s staged yet intimate portrait photographs, seduce the viewer into uncomfortable, voyeuristic complicity with the camera. Several works represent adolescent girls on the verge of sexual consciousness, their bodies still that of a child while their gaze directly confronts the viewer implying differently. Michal Chelbin shoots in a format of utter stability-the square.

Photography (Photography)

The half-length portrait of Joe Shirley presents a man with a great presence, wearing several items that point to ancestral Native American culture. In this photograph, which is relatively poor in information, the projection screen in the background acts as a clue about the event: Bruno Serralongue went to the second phase of the ‘Sommet Mondial sur la Société de l’Information’ (or SMSI, World Summit on Information Society, in Tunis in November 2005). This portrait echoes another picture in the same series (Native Peoples Claim Their Right to Participate in the Information Society) in which Joe Shirley is just a silhouette amongst the speakers, whereas here he occupies the entire frame.

Photography (Photography)

“Films inspired people a lot. they came to perform kissing in front of a camera. In a conservative society such as Saida, people were willing to play the kiss between two people of the same sex, but very rarely between a man and a woman.

Photography (Photography)

“When you position your hand on someone’s shoulder, your shoulders become straight and horizontal. Placing one’s hand on a stable surface helps position the shoulders and the general posture of the body.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

Photography (Photography)

“In the 1980s I started using coloured paper backdrops, one of which was yellow. You can see they never reached the floor. I used them for colour and black-and-white photography.” Hashem El Madani.

Photography (Photography)

For I use to eat lemon meringue pie till I overloaded on my pancreas with sugar and passed out; It seemed to be a natural response to a society of abundance (1978), also known as the Bodybuilder series, Martinez asked male bodybuilding competitors to pose in whatever position felt “most natural.” They are obviously trained in presenting their ambitiously carved physiques, but their facial expressions seem comparatively unstudied. Against a bare white background, the men appear unexpectedly vulnerable, caught between performance and rehearsal, public and private. While they present themselves deliberately as exemplars of strength, they also inadvertently expose something about the value system that underlies their endeavors—whatever drove them to keep building by tearing tissue, and whatever makes flexing feel like the most honest pose possible.